


Spirits of the Earth and Sky

by Littlewhitemouse



Category: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X
Genre: Angst, Massive Crossover, Medical Torture, Multi, Torture, hurt/comfort in a way, i spell it 'Aeris', i wonder if the author is really interested in pagan religions, more characters and relationships to be added when they become relevant, really really weird medial torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-12-04
Packaged: 2018-01-08 07:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 55,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlewhitemouse/pseuds/Littlewhitemouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Huge crossover, mostly FFVII characters in the world of Spira, but characters come from all listed games. Only central characters listed above. There are MANY characters. Many. No relationship listed yet, but many are implied.</p><p>Aeris Gainsborough, an Ancient Spirit and Protector of Spira, has been trying to defend her planet from the attacks of a malevolent invader Spirit for a long time. In an unfortunate man, the victim of the experiments of a mad scientist, she sees a missing link that could give her the power and information she needs to destroy her old enemy. But it will be a very, very long road from ruin to success.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [My dear Amara White](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=My+dear+Amara+White).



> In this fanfiction, the world of Gaia from Final Fantasy Seven is fused with the world of Spira from Final Fantasy Ten into a combination that looks (mostly) like Spira but works as a fusion of the two that isn’t quite like either of them. Both Fayth and Lifestream exist, and the villains of both games exist, and such giants of power do not blend seamlessly. The main characters are mostly (but not entirely) from Gaia and they are sometimes adapted strangely to fit their new situation. There are a few things in both canons changed, and a few details are quietly fudged and the plot holes they have created are paved over loosely. I think I did a good job at fusing the two worlds, but there are many errors, and I ask the reader to take these errors with a grain of salt.
> 
> Since the story is evolving as I write it, there's a good chance that yet more Square games will eventually find themselves tied in. I enjoy cameos. 
> 
> Furthermore, the fanfiction is written for a woman who understands biology thoroughly and enjoys mad science but written by a woman whose passion is wordplay and whose knowledge of proper medicine is more Renaissance than anything. There are glaring, piteous errors in the treatments of biology, neurology, and physics in this story, warped to fit in a world guided by magic and imagined by a fanciful self-taught beginner astrologist. What few scientific facts I have correct, I thank my moirail and the internet for. The ones I have incorrect, I blame myself for. 
> 
> Finally, there is one original character. She’s is not related to any canon character and no one falls in love with her. She does have an unusual hair and eye color, but to all complaints about that I see your complaint and raise you every single member of SOLDIER. Here be the wrong series to not want mary sues in.
> 
> Edit: All-new illustrations drawn by Amara, my dear friend and the person I wrote this story for! Thank you, Love.

 

In a deep place in Macalania forest, in the dead of winter, the croaks and hums of small beasts, those tough skinned enough for the time of year where rain and wind plagued the dark forest, fell hushed. Hunting animals with glowing eyes shied circular around a small pool, buried in the fronds of bent old trees, and the little fish inside gravitated towards the edges, making way.

They were strange fish, these fish-- nothing ate them, and they, gracefully decked with transparent fins and glittering scales, grew larger than the most pampered pet fish in Bevelle. They were mako fish. They lived in a Lifestream pool, where the energy of Spira sometimes bubbled up in chilling green eruptions and crystallized like sap on the shore, so none dared touch them. Even the big forest insects, which normally nipped at the bright scales of the mako fish, did not bother them today. As the excited fish swam in faster cycles around the edge of the clear pool, the water began to grow bright, like swimming mercury, and bubbled with energy- but not with heat. A dark shape emerged in view far, far below the surface, a shape thin with silk-like hairs floating around it as it floated upwards. The waters turned deep green, and shivered.

A spirit of the Lifestream, a mighty Ancient, broke through the top of the pool almost soundlessly, rising straight out of the water, with her dark hair plastered to her sides. Clear water poured off of her as the waves slowly darkened  and the big fish curiously nibbled at the woman standing on the banks of their home.

Aeris guided them away with her thin hand, shaking from cold and from the effort of moving a physical body. She eventually got her stiff legs to draw her out of the water, fighting against the old-fashioned, off-white dress that clung to her new body, and stepped onto Macalania's land.

There was a gentle mist falling from the sky, left over from an earlier storm, and some rays of the sun, glittering, shone through the rain in what gaps there were in the thick foliage. Aeris moved her arms in dance-like circles to get used to them, smiling, feeling the leaves at her feet and the sun on her face again, and smelled the vines filled with tiny white flowers who clung to strong old trees, and saw, when she finally opened her eyes, the feathers of a curious scarlet bird, who knew an Ancient when he saw her but not what that meant.

She chased the bird away with her awkward motions, giggling. She stretched her arms above her head, and then touched her toes with the tips of her fingers, and then leaped, and then spun, then sighed as she went up and down from the tips of her toes to the balls of her feet. Being an Ancient more attached to the surface of the earth and more used to incarnations than most, she knew how to use a body, but like a man who hasn't steered a ship in many years; she was no longer used to the controls. She felt blood flowing in her, she felt signals travelling all around her body, helping her move this muscle, tense this sinew, she felt the strong bones relying on the help of the little cells and ligaments binding and surrounding them.

She put her body to use and began walking towards Bevelle. She had a problem that needed solving, and only so much time to solve it.

She walked without stopping for three days (since the spirits of the Lifestream. which normally flow through time as a great collective, fueling each other with their own energy, and self-sufficiently made the planet grow with their powers, have such abilities), parting the tangled vines of the trees with silent requests. Sometimes a bird or beast would fly beside her, but soon they would part, busy with their own affairs. As she walked, she stooped down sometimes to heal the leg of a wounded animal, repair a plant's bitten stem, or raise her hand with a glower and purge an infected beast that crouched to pounce on her before they even knew she was aware of it. She would have gladly stayed in the forest and been its spirit for a while, removing the infection from those infected, healing small ills-- but she was not here to tend one wound on the whole, sick planet-- her dear, diseased Spira. She was here for all of Spira.

Eventually, the forest thinned out around her, and she walked on the grass and sprawling weeds alongside a low-traffic dirt road that led to Bevelle. She walked through the suburban slums, scattering the great bouquet of forest flowers she had gathered on her three-day walk wherever there was either enough dirt for them to grow or a person who wanted one. She stopped once before her eventual destination-- at Bevelle's temple, to stand for a while and watch the worshippers, and clasp her hands in prayer.

She left the temple (where the voices of her people sang, who chose to join with the energy of the planet, with the planet, in the planet's blood, and become of its force, and join in its force, and strengthen it) and walked up and down the rising streets of glittering, bejeweled Bevelle, barefoot, in a dress stained with mako brought with her from the Lifestream, with dirt on her hand and leaves not stuck to but being absorbed by her skin. Bevelle, as always, shined in the sunlight, and her eye, modeled after the prehistoric form she had many millennia ago, didn't much like the sight. But she enjoyed the warmth, she enjoyed the careful designs of their jewelers and artisans who decorated the walls of the city and the necks of its citizens, she enjoyed the harmonic music on the street corners, drawn out of strings and vocal chords, and she enjoyed putting a finger to her lips and smiling before she touched the severed leg of a beggar and regrew it.

She raised her head and walked into the building that stood curiously in front of the houses of the government-- ShinRa headquarters. The company, whose expertise was in pulling energy out of the Lifestream and storing it in solid form, were only the successors of a very long line of companies which had done and will do the same. She disregarded the disdainful (and distrusting) looks that the workers sitting in the marble lobby gave her as they tried to discern what race she was, and what she was doing in ShinRa headquarters with a simple dress, no jewels, and unbound hair. She paused a second to admire the actually quite masterful architecture of the windowed upper walls and domed ceiling of the building, which were decorated in quiet, formal, floral designs in marble and good wood.

She eventually approached the wooden desk at the back of the fern-decorated and spacious meeting hall, and smiled, saying in a voice she hoped sounded human-- "I would like to make an appointment with Professor Hojo, please, dear."

The receptionist arched her eyebrows, and gracefully deflected. "You're gonna have to talk with his personal secretary." She pointed with her fountain pen to the dumbwaiter, a metal contraption with thin mako pipes and a man standing in a severe, black outfit, waiting for customers. "Fiftieth floor, five Gil for the dumbwaiter."

"Oh my," said Aeris, putting a hand on her cheek. "Five for both up and down, or five for up and five for down?"

"Five both times," she said, turning pointedly away from Aeris.

Aeris sighed and removed exactly ten paperclips from the side of her desk where she kept a small stack of office supplies. She changed them as she walked leisurely over the elevator, admiring whoever found a way to make sure that the noonday sun lit every single corner of the long room. She approached the dumbwaiter with a smile, and made a giggling bet with the assistant that she would wait at least three months to meet with the professor.

 

-

 

Outside of the recovery house a thousand feet up on Mount Gagazet, overlooking the silent Calm Lands where dry winds tossed around golden grasses, Cloud Strife struggled to breathe.

They cut down the Ether in his Ether/oxygen mix just a few days ago. No one knew if it would do anything. They hoped that cutting down the Ether would slowly abate some of his more painful symptoms, but SPIRIT recovery was a maybe ten-year-old science, and no one knew whether their attempts caused useful agony or pointless agony yet.

Anyway, everyone knew cutting his Ether would cause him incredible pain, but what could they do? They were trying to wean him from an addiction, and that was painful, and that would always be painful.

He sat on the porch, in the cold air, because he was nauseous, because he couldn't eat during transitions. He stared at the red marks on his skin, unthinking, as he breathed.

Breathing too much oxygen burned his lungs. That's what happened when a person was strapped to a tank with only Ether to breathe for some years. But Ether was poisonous, and the poison would kill him almost no matter what, and the 'almost' inspired years of therapy. The great chunks of skin and muscle missing on his sides didn't help breathing either, since his lungs weren't totally sure how or where to expand anymore.

His brain ached and his muscles spasmed because they weren't used to the oxygen content. He tried to breathe more slowly instead of in the hyper rhythm that he had to when he was breathing mostly Ether, but no matter what he did, it hurt, it scraped his throat raw, it made him dizzy, it gave him a headache, it made him unable to think or move much, so the twenty-something army veteran sat on the porch of the recovery home full of mutants and survivors and cried.

He would like to say he was a hardened soul that never cried or spoke of his pain except at his most tragic moments, but he was an invalid, and there wasn’t an invalid in that home that didn’t spend at least one night in the week sobbing and cursing heaven. The pain of the mind abates, and heals with time, but the body can hurt forever if it’s been prepared for that. And the pain of the body cannot be tricked away or ignored. It keeps hurting, and doesn’t grow dull through repetition.

Cloud would leave SPIRIT and all the ‘help’ it was trying to give him but the people holding him here were the same people that assigned him to testing in the Nibelheim lab, the low concrete building under the rolling lighting on the dark and tempestuous plain, constantly battered by wind that tore down tall trees but almost never calmed with rain. Cloud signed up for years of duty, and they decided he would serve his years in military-sanctioned recovery after he tried to run away.

So this is where he would stay, as scientists kinder but with knives just as painful as the last ones tried to wean him off of the Ether that was killing him (despite the fact that he could die without it), heal his scars, regrow his muscle, and solve the mental issues that made him unable to look people in the face and fall nonverbal when a question made him nervous. His only respite was that they never found out who he was, since he had entered the army too young and never gave anyone proper ID, so his family did not have to ever be informed of his state.

He fiddled with the pressure knob on his tank, seeing if making more or less ether/air flow through the tubes to his mask would dull the pain a little. The quick transitions just made his head pound, so he sat still and didn’t think about anything for a while.

He just stared at the patches of jewel colored weeds that swayed on the bright, open, totally flat Calm Lands, and felt his pain, and only felt his pain. There was a decent cloud cover that spring day, so the light shifted over the earth in visible patches, reaching across the plains, cooling the brightness of the spring sun. He didn’t think anything about what he saw, because there was no room for his head for anything but the pain. But it was a quiet site, repetitive like a river, and if anything would cool sore eyes, it was the Calm Lands. _The Ancients made this place as an incarnate mercy,_ thought Cloud in one of his more lucid moments.

He came from a family of old believers, the sort that are hidden in the far corners of plains and forests across Wilderia Continent, who still said prayers and gave food to the Lifestream as well as the Fayth. Most of the people of Spira, the educated people of its cities and the wise temple priests, believed only in the Fayth and their opponent Sin, and called the old stories about the Lifestream and the Ancient race superstition. But Cloud’s family came from the area of the Thunder Plains where there were yearly festivals held on harvest day to praise and thank the force of the world that caused crops to grow and the frost to thaw, where dried herbs were bent into wreaths for every brow and offerings of food sunk in rivers in specially made stone jars to depths where the Fayth would hopefully receive them. They believed in the Fayth and their Aeons and Sin as well, since these things were all visible and obvious and there was no denying them, but these were only their facts—their religion was the religion of the earth, not of the temples of the Fayth.

There was no consensus, actually, about whether the force of the Lifestream made the planet or was made along with it, but Cloud silently thanked them for the Calm Lands anyway.

Eventually, it grew darker and colder, and bigger swatches of grey shadow swept lumbering across the gold fields, and one of the kinder orderlies asked Cloud if he wanted to come in for dinner. Cloud didn’t want dinner, but he accepted her arm to help him stand up and walk in. He may as well try to sleep. Besides, he was slowly getting used to the new oxygen concentration—he figured tomorrow would be a bit of a better day.

Unless it was just better enough to madden him with boredom or with guilt.

It was in the middle of the night, after Cloud had been lying awake for seven hours with his headache and a quicker wind than usually has started blowing off of the field and up the mountain, where it rattled the windows of the recovery house playfully, that the house received company. Cloud deliriously heard orderlies walking down the hall to answer the door, and a strangely cheerful voice greeting them with words he didn’t catch but whose high pitch hurt his head. Eventually, she was told to quiet down, and all he heard was the occasional step and creak as the visitor was settled down.

He did not know who it could be. Usually, midnight arrivals were deathly ill and previously forgotten victims of the SPIRIT experiments whose transfer into recovery could not wait. Perhaps she was sent from ShinRa to check up on their progress, but he didn’t know why she would show up in the middle of the night. A summoner on quest who needed refuge—maybe, but she wouldn’t be cheerful either, this close to the Zanarkand ruins.

(He didn’t know whether ShinRa thought it was funny to put their most miserable invalids that close to the ruins, but it wasn’t like Sin being slammed into a mountain by an irate summoner would put most of them through any more pain than they already endured.)

He slept for a few hours, and crawled out of his bed at five because he couldn’t lie down any longer. He shouldered his metal tank onto his back (since he still couldn’t bear to drag a side tank of oxygen mix along with him) and went to the breakfast hall to ask for coffee and nothing else.

He was right, he wasn’t in as much pain as he was the day before—which meant he had enough headspace to be depressed. After he had managed to quietly ask for coffee (and received coffee and a full Bevelle-style breakfast, with light curries and yogurt, which made his stomach twist with panic because he knew he would not be able to dare waste it) he shuffled into the cafeteria, where no one, literally no one was awake but a nurse on night cleaning duty and a smiling woman sitting at a table alone with no food in front of her wearing nothing but a light-colored, simple dress.

The visitor, thought Cloud. He wondered how he could convince the nurse to just let him take his food to his room to eat when the visitor waved him down to the seat across from her. When he finally sat down and looked up at her, he was suddenly glad he did.

She did not look native, not at all, nor did she look Al Bhed, or Jenovine, or even as if she were from far-off Wutai where people are darker. She had a face that was not only foreign—it was not modern. Her eyes were spaced differently, her hair was a sort of chestnut color not often seen in Spira anymore, her cheeks bones were of an odd shape, she was incredibly short—maybe a full head shorter than him, and he was not a tall man. He knew what this woman was—he had been told stories about Ancients, whose bodies are those that human’s cousins wore thousands of years ago, would walk the earth and ask for boons. He could hardly believe it, but he had seen the painted faces of the Ancients thousands of times in ceremonies, and if she were not one, then she was their closest descendant.

“I don’t have any bracelets,” said Cloud suddenly.

The woman’s eyes grew wide in curiosity. “No?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t seem like much of a problem to me, you don’t have to sort of look that goes well with lots of jewelry,” she said.

 Cloud turned red. “I. When a travelling Ancient in disguise came to the young lady, as said in a certain parable, and asked her for gil, she had no gil and gave him a fine bracelet instead. And the ancient blessed her. That was dumb. Sorry.” It was an effort to speak that much, and the loss of oxygen started renewing his headache.

“I haven’t heard the story! How did you know, though,” she asked, he voice soft and inquisitive, her fingers unevenly laced, “that I was an Ancient?” 

“No one else could tell?” asked Cloud, reminding himself to breathe deeply. “Your face is… alien. They say the Ancients weren’t human, but similar to humans. What else could you be?”

“People in Bevelle just thought I was ugly!” she said with a big grin.

Cloud shook his head, looking down at the table. “People in Bevelle are stupid. Sorry.”    

“Well, I can’t believe it’s your fault. And no, I met a very intelligent dumbwaiter operator when I was there… there’s always a few good people hiding in the corners.”

Cloud didn’t disagree out loud, but Aeris could see the frustration on his downturned face. Aeris grew worried as she talked to him—this was the sort of posture, the sort of voice, that a child who has been abused since the beginning of their life has. Well, she heard about Hojo, when she was They, and They were enraged then at his atrocities—did she expect strong, smiling victims? She decided not to push the ‘people are good’ angle to a man who looked like he mostly knew demons. “Are you what they call a SPIRIT? It took me forever to realize that by SPIRIT they meant a sort of human.”

“Yeah. That’s me. I’m a test subject in the SPIRIT project, most people got to calling us all SPIRITs now.”

“Are SPIRITs specially classified?”

“No, they don’t have to make any rules or specifications for us. You’re not going to see any of us on the streets.”

“I’m surprised you move, looking at you,” said Aeris, who had gotten a sick feeling in her stomach every time the man twisted around enough for his black shirt to fold and show her that he was thinner on his sides than any human being could be without a corset or a few holes.

“Yeah. That’s why we're not out much.”

Aeris sighed as Cloud cast his face down again and stirred anxiously with his coffee. He wanted to ask the Ancient what she wanted from him, but he wasn’t sure if there was a way to ask politely. He wanted to know what on Earth an Ancient was doing going to the surface to visit a recovery home, since he couldn’t imagine what spiritual quest would lead her here. But he was too shocked by the encounter itself to cobble together any questions about it. His head was swimming with shock, and a bit of disbelief. Aeris, for her part, was trying to examine his face, and see how much of his downcast visage was chiseled in anxiety and how much in trauma, the parts she could see behind the foggy face-mask covering his nose and mouth anyway. Cloud lifted the visor for just a second to lift the shaking coffee cup to his mouth, took an infinitesimal sip, and snapped his mask back over his face, panting from holding his breath.

“I am called Aeris,” said she is a lighter, less cheerful voice than the one she had been using before.

Cloud nodded, and said, “Cloud Strife. Native of Nibelheim. It’s a small town in the Thunder Plains.”

“I always liked the Thunder Plains,” said Aeris. “They have their own atmosphere. It’s dark, but vibrant, and everything crackles with anticipation, nothing ever stops moving, but the grasses and the weeds and the air all roll and turn… its always warm, and always dry, and its just so strange… there’s no where else on all the planet like it, I promise you.”

“No?”

“On another continent, there are sand dune deserts, which have a similar atmosphere, but they’re too bright and not as exciting. Or as romantic. Romantic in the sense that they are evocative, dramatic, intense… like an opera in the sky, riding in on the cloud-palaces of the Fayth.”

“Do they have those?”

“What?”

“Palaces. The Fayth.” Cloud couldn’t help asking, even if he was sure, somewhere, that it was impertinent. He had read about great priests having arguments about these things.

“Oh,” said Aeris, smiling, “not as such. It’s more like the clouds and the mists are their palaces as they are. The Fayth are beings of the air, so they rest in the heavy air of the clouds.”

“Is that how it is?”

“Yes,” said Aeris. She drew a circle with her finger on the plastic table to represent Spira. “Under Spira, there is the Lifestream, and over Spira, the realm of the Fayth, which is a ring of gentle and thin vapors that surround Spira and protect it, for the most part, from anything harmful beyond this world. The Lifestream’s element is not easily defined by what visual comparatives we have, but the people in the Lifestream, we who were the Ancients, we are spirits of the earth. We came from earth, we live in earth, we have bound our natures to the earth and become part of the planet in a way that makes us, essentially, earth, because we are factors in earth.”

Cloud nodded minutely as Aeris spoke, a nervous tick that showed he was listening. “The village priestess always described the Lifestream as water, though.”

Aeris drew winding lines inside her sphere as she spoke. “It’s a good picture, and it does really look a lot like a river, doesn’t it? That’s not quite what it is, though. Some say it is the blood stream of the planet, but it has a different function, actually- if Spira is a body, the Lifestream is its defense system—the part that expels viruses, heals the cracks rent by volcanoes and the turn of the planet around its sun, and gives all the other parts of the body of Spira encouragement and energy to grow. The Lifestream was originally just this, and it was nonsentient—it was the Planet’s own will, and the Planet’s own life force, which manifested in all its life—we call the mind of the human the human itself, and the Lifestream, the mind of Spira, is Spira. It’s complicated theory. It is thinking will and the power to act alike, which humans don’t usually have. When my people, the Ancients, decided to join our souls permanently with the Lifestream instead of using its force to reincarnate, we became of the Lifestream—of Spira—and therefore spirits of the Earth.”

“I always forget…” muttered Cloud, also sketching little circles and streams on his side of the table, “That the Ancients were once mortal like us.”

Aeris smiled fondly. “Yes. The Lifestream was there since the start of Spira, but we Ancients, whose humble roots first began to grow some tens of thousands of years ago, only joined with the Lifestream recently, according to Spira’s memory.”

“And Ancients were not the same as modern humans.”

“No, modern humans are a cousin species to what the Ancients were. It means we descended from similar branches weren’t quite the same.” She looked at him inquisitively. “Are there really churches that teach that the Ancients were once mortals? I thought that now everyone believes we were immortal spirits originally.”

“A lot of people do. I guess I just got lucky enough to grow up in a truly backwards town,” said Cloud with a wry grin.

Aeris giggled. “And you know that the Fayth are even younger than the Ancients. Well, the some thousand Fayth that everyone celebrates now, there have always been air spirits, but we don’t have to get into that.”

“Yes. They were made by one powerful Ancient to defeat a great threat. But…” Cloud bashfully looked down.

“It didn’t work,” said Aeris. “You can say it.”

“I didn’t want to be disrespectful.”

Aeris cleared her throat, and waited for Cloud, who had the expression of a guilty dog, to look up at her.

She poked him in the forehead. “Then don’t lie. The best way to be respectful is to treat someone equally! It shows you want them to face the truth and grow, not sit surrounded by lies and stagnate.”

“Um…” Cloud looked down again. “Okay.”

Aeris let the less-than-impressive response lie. “The Fayth, as you know them, were created some thousand years ago by an Ancient to try to fend off a creature called Jenova, who came from space and tried to infect the Lifestream with her toxin.”

Cloud startled. “I was told they were created to fight Sin.”

“Sin and Jenova are close relations. It’s complicated, so let me return to my original topic. The relations of the Lifestream and the Fayth. The Fayth were, just like those Ancients which make up part of the Lifestream, originally mortal. They willingly became spirits— again just like the Ancients—to try to protect Spira. The Ancients, and all the other forces in the Lifestream, are earth creatures, so it is difficult for them to leave the earth, and since their function is to preserve and protect, it is difficult for most of them to fight. Fayth were made, purposefully, as spirits not of earth but air, who could move freely above ground, and tend to the surface affairs of Spira instead of being hidden below, tending to its inner needs like us in the Lifestream. They are made with the ability to fight, and they protect Spira with their violence, just like the Lifestream does with its peace. Besides, Fayth are all individuals, and the Lifestream... we have individual minds, I suppose, but we are a collective consciousness, and one cannot act rashly or fight recklessly because the hesitation of the rest checks them. We exist always together, but with a separate entity... it's hard to explain. The souls who willingly became Fayth were paid poorly for their war service, however," sighed Aeris, her tone turning mournful.

Cloud frowned. "How so?"

"Some hoped to be allowed to return to the Lifestream after death, like most humans-- to re-enter the life-force of the planet, and stay in the planets cycle, rebirthing. But the Lifestream is a force of earth, and it accepts spirits and creatures of earth-- Ancients, humans, animals, plants, stones, all that has matter and can be made matter anew-- but it cannot accept formless spirits of the air, so the Fayth and their Aeons are kept to the air, and the loss of their spirits weakens the Lifestream."

Cloud considered this. "It's a fair trade for the defense. It's the Fayth and their Aeons that defeat Sin every time and give us the Calms."

"Fair for us, not for them."

"True." Cloud looked down for a minute. "I must thank you."

"It's appreciated, but you don't have to!"

"This is more about the Lifestream... about Spira... about anything than I have any right to know. Why are you telling me these things? Why give one crippled, worthless man the secrets of the Ancients?"

Aeris kept her hurt in her eyes and away from her voice. "They aren't secrets, really, as I see them, anyone could put the facts together... there are endless records about my people, my world of the Lifestream, about the Fayth, about the two menaces that plague Spira... it's all there for people to read. If there's a secret, the secret is somehow in the belief, not the knowledge. And I am telling you because I think you, or one of your colleagues, could help me with something."

"Me? Help an Ancient?" Cloud swallowed his bitter doubt with his sweeter awe. "How? If I'm any use."

"You could well be! I knew you would have a lot of questions about my Lifestream, but I noticed the SPIRIT didn't have to wonder too much about the nature of the Fayth."

Cloud frowned. "Of course not. Hojo's experiements..."

"Were an attempt to turn humans into walking Fayth trapped in their bodies and thus controllable without a pact-- don't worry, I know what the SPIRIT project is, and I have my opinions about it," Aeris said with an affronted sniff that almost looked mocking on her, since she didn't have a face for serious disdain. "What Hojo doesn't know-- what I hope that gross old man doesn't know-- is how similar his experiments are to the experiments of another creature."

Cloud's stomach dropped slowly. "Who else?"

"Jenova."

"The thing you mentioned."

"Jenova," said Aeris, in an uncustomary monotone, "is the enemy of the Lifestream. We are the immune system of the Planet, and she is a malign cancer, malevolent, hateful, and ever eager to hurt Spira wherever she can."

"Why haven't I heard of Jenova before?"

Aeris leaned back in her chair uncomfortably, gazing at the just rising sun casting scarlet and golden light over the bumps and rushes of the Calm Lands. Shadows lengthened, but they were tipped with soft pale yellow, and a wild thrush or two sang in the patches of shaded weeds around the recovery house in the mountains. "Many reasons. One is that the Fayth and their Aeons, as well as Sin, are all visible, and the Lifestream and Jenova-- except for certain holy and unholy places in Spira-- are invisible. Another reason is that the legend of Jenova is tied with the legend of the Lifestream, which was suppressed when the Temples of the Fayth wanted to gain power."

Cloud impulsively made a rude gesture favored among his village that was mostly reserved for Fayth-people. Aeris tried not to giggle. "Besides, Jenova herself likes to remain quiet and unseen, and all attempts to prove she exists have been surprisingly difficult-- people stopped listening to Ancients like me when we started insisting that drawing up Spira's force and saving it in solid form to power airships and walking mechina was weakening Spira and ShinRa should, of course, shut down immediately."

"Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense."

Aeris nodded and sighed. "There's more than just that, but it will make sense when I talk more clearly of Jenova later. If you're interested."

"Interested in what?"

"Helping me."

Aeris smiled softly and her smile crinkled up the sides of her strange, wide face. Cloud looked at her hand, first startled, then worried. "If you expect to pull me up with that," he said sadly, "You should know that half the time, SPIRIT ether addicts fall back down."

Aeris nodded, and put her hand down on the table where Cloud might place his on top of hers instead. "The Lifestream grows weaker as the Fayth and our beloved humans weaken us accidentally. We have enemies, and our enemies seek to poison and defile our Spira. I believe that Hojo's terrible mistake could do us good, in that the power of the SPIRITs-- though you seem weak-- could aid us against our enemies."

"So you need a SPIRIT, is that it?"

"I do, and I think you would be best?"

"Why?" asked Cloud quietly.

Aeris cocked her head to the side. "Don't you realize?"

"No."

Aeris shook her head. She reminded herself not to be coy with this one, there was no point in teasing someone who wasn't joking about his defects. "I expected to spend a week in this facility trying to convince a hardened, traumatized, wounded veteran who has been abused by his command that I really am a mythical being from a lost race that lives in the manifest life force of my planet. But the first person who I ran into was you, Cloud. It was like you were put here for me."

"I was put here to recover," said Cloud blandly, then after a beat he flushed and said "sorry. You didn't mean that literally."

"I didn't, but you bring up an excellent point!" Aeris clapped her hands together. "If you agreed to come with me-- to travel across Spira, to the bright city of Bevelle, across the dark Thunder Plains, to the Jenovine Chasamaecum, to the silent and vine-draped Temples of the Fayth on my quest to rid the world of its virus and its tumor (so I respectively call them)-- wouldn't you end up in a lot of pain?"

Cloud looked up at her through his eyelashes. "Could you pacify my pain?"

Aeris held his gaze for as long as he could manage. "If I can find a way to get my earth-based and physical healing to work on an etherized SPIRIT, who resembles a Fayth as much as a human, then I could. But it might take some time. And once I had the cure, if the cure exists, I promise I would do all in my power to spread it. "

Cloud nodded slowly. "And why do you need a SPIRIT? You said Hojo's work reminded you of..."

"Of how Jenova made Sin."

"Wow."

"It's daunting," she admitted, "And not a positive connection to make, I know. You are nothing like Sin. But the transformation method that Hojo attempted on you and that Jenova succeeded in are eerily similar, from what I've heard."

"Yikes," muttered Cloud, and Aeris stifled a giggle. "What would you need from me if I came?"

He was cautious, but Aeris knew he hated his decrepit body, and that he would accept her offer of a potential healing if it was feasible. "Two things, neither pleasant. I need you to let me, and likely other forces of the Lifestream, enter your physical body-- I'll explain exactly how later-- to try to see how your inner chemistry has been altered."

"Bothers me less than some examinations I've had so far."

"And I would need...' Aeris trailed off. "And you wouldn't have to do this all at once..." she blushed. "I'm very sorry."

Cloud waited.

"I would need you to tell me, in detail, every experiment that Hojo worked on you." Aeris held her gaze on his downcast eyes, which flicked around the room a few ways, then followed his fingers pulling his hands towards him on the table.

“Well, alright,” he said, shrugging.

“Alright?” asked Aeris, head cocked.

“I’ve gone over every detail three times for three doctors. Don’t assume you can overload me with any pain, trauma, embarrassment, or discomfort. There isn’t much you can do. The only issue will be the amount of time it takes to go over about three or four years of experimentation in detail.”

Aeris made a sort of ‘huh’ sound, and examined Cloud with her hands on her hips and bright eyes. “You’re more capable than I expected to find anyone here.”

“Invalids are very capable people,” argued Cloud, flushed,” they’re just in too much pain to exercise their capabilities most of the time.”

“Well, I can believe that. I’ll have to keep you as pain-free as I can while travelling, then.”

“Can you do that? You said all the ether in my system would make that difficult.”

“It will make curing you very difficult, but I think I can convince your fried nerves and muscles to relax, or, if nothing else, block your pain receptors efficiently. Which means we’ll have to be very careful getting around, but I’m an Ancient. I can get around through astral projection if I want.”

Cloud said nothing, but nodded. Aeris decided that this was her cue to get the ball rolling. “Do you have a lot of personal belongings here?”

“A few.”

“Pack them up. I’ll be telling the staff that I found my fiancé that I didn’t dare describe last night because I feared the years had changed him too much and that he had never given his real name to ShinRa.”

“Right on both accounts, actually.”

“Oh? Than what’s your actual name?” asked Aeris as she stood up from the cheap plastic chair, stretching her already stiff and uncomfortable legs.

“It’s Cloud Strife. I’ve been telling ShinRa that my name is Tidus for years now.”

Aeris paused to observe Cloud again. “You gave me your true name.” Than she added, “I gave you mine, but that’s a cheaper gift in my case, I think.”

Cloud clasped his hands on the table in nervousness, looked down on them, and said, in a slightly tremulous voice. “We People of the Plains, humble and thankful, give back to the Lifestream all we have to give, because the Lifestream gave us everything. We give to the Ancients all they ask, should they ask, for the Ancients have promised us all of happiness.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a ritual prayer. I figured a name wasn’t really an expensive gift for an Ancient.”

Aeris bit her lip. “If you feel like you HAVE to go on this quest with me…”

“I am going,” said Cloud.

“I’m not sure I understand why.”

“Neither am I. But I’m going, because you asked, and because I…”

“Am sick of being in pain.”

Cloud cleared his throat, tilting his head to the side and blinking quickly. “A dog can be kicked over and over, it still begs for food if hungry. Because it won’t just die. Even if it’s almost been killed. We don’t deserve to live. We can’t really deserve to take up space on the planet. But living a day without pain is a sort of beauty appreciated on its own even if its someone like me hoarding it.”

“Like how a sunny day needs no excuses,” said Aeris wistfully, and fought her temptation to argue with Cloud.  “Then let’s travel before any clouds build. Gather your stuff, and then meet me on the front porch as soon as you can. Climbing down Gagazet is going to be exciting!”

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

On the slopes of Mount Gagazet, where everything was warm with the ripe heat of the only summer month in which no face of the mountain sees snow, Aeris explained to Cloud why temporarily blocking his pain receptors was a terrible idea and would probably make his situation worse and could easily get him wounded, and then she temporarily blocked his pain receptors. “I’ll cook up a better solution once we’re settled on the Calm Lands for the night,” she promised.

Cloud wasn’t really listening. He was enjoying breathing without his lungs stinging, and looking into the sun without tears foiling his eyesight. And stepping without his legs feeling like they were being pulled to pieces in his muscles. The rocks of Gagazet weren’t comfortable, and they still poked at his feet through his flimsy shoes, but they were warm, and wildflowers and weeds sprang up in the gaps between huge boulders, the tiny graceful filigree of the great powers of earth. The sun was turning high above in the sky and its rays tossed around his unkempt and long blonde hair, and attempted to ruffle his old, dirty clothes—his black clothes from home, worlds from starched hospital gowns. Aeris jumped lightly ahead of him from stone to stone, describing the exact way he should descend in order to do the least damage to his pain-dulled system.

On the way, she chattered more in-depth about the purpose and nature of the Lifestream, since Cloud kept asking for more detail about it, and he enjoyed watching her loose, long, chestnut hair flutter in the breeze, like seaweed in water. She was cheerful, but not inquisitive, she kept her happiness to herself, and let it glimmer on her like the sun on the water, but did not force its light on others like a searching sun ray, determined to light dark places.

Eventually, as it was getting towards evening, they officially stepped off of the overgrown, fallen stones at the mountains face and onto packed, solid dirt. Aeris smiled the second her bare foot met the soft intertwined grass with deep, tangling roots, and her smile was even evident to Cloud behind her. He sat on the earth beside her, and stared at her closed eyes and blissful face, waiting.

“I would say it’s like coming home,” Aeris said, “but it is coming home. I know exactly how Spira moves beneath me, and I can feel its shifts, and the spin of its turn, and I can feel everywhere its pulsating life and movement, its dance in space…” Aeris looked at Cloud. “Now, let’s settle down and try to get your pain numbed without killing you. Your feet are probably in shreds by now.”

“They are,” marveled Cloud, lifting them up to see their bloody patches, “but I can’t even feel that!”

Aeris laughed nervously. “Okay. How long will that tank you have on your back last you?”

Cloud shrugged. “Usually they last months. I’m down to not needing a lot of Ether at once.”

“Wow. They must compress them well. Like I said, I can get ether myself if we must, but I’m hoping to find a way to wean you off of it fast… painfully, but fast.”

“Already more than I can hope for, with any amount of pain,” Cloud promised.

Aeris nodded. “Sit down. When I work, it’s good to have as much of you grounded to Spira as possible.” So saying, she flopped down, her long skirt billowing around her. Cloud hefted his tank from off of his shoulders, careful not to disturb the tubes connecting to his mask (since though Aeris said breathing pure air wouldn’t hurt him right now, it would be a bad idea) and set that down, letting gravity pull him with it. He crossed his legs and straightened the tubes headed to his tank before nodding that he was ready.

“First,” said Aeris, “I am going to run a diagnostic, in which I use my ability to feel the mechanisms of a working body to figure out what isn’t working in you. While I do that, you will describe what is physically wrong with your body, and what the doctors have done to fix you so far, to the best of your knowledge. Don’t worry about telling me how you got to this state yet, that story can come while it comes.” Cloud agreed. Aeris put a finger on her chin. “Did I forget anything? Ah... the diagnosis itself shouldn’t hurt, unless…. eh, it shouldn’t hurt.”

“Good to hear,” said Cloud, and he shut his eyes and began to regulate his breathing as well he could. He developed this habit after several years of seeing how too much or too little air and ether could cause a riot of pain in his head.

Aeris listened to the wind for a minute. It was wandering slowly over the plains, savoring the smell of little yellow bell flowers and the warm, sun-bleached grasses as they swayed. The layers of Spira were deep beneath, clay and stone and warm plasma mixed together in veins, with the motes of the Lifestream moving fast between. Her fellows whispered to her, though dimly, not as clearly as one they would have. It was still enough. With their thoughts in her head (since it wasn’t just hers) she lifted her arms, palms crossed, in front of Cloud’s third eye. ‘Can you see me?’ she wondered, but got no reply. All the same, he had known her for what she was.

“I am going to look inside you now,” she said softly.

Cloud was silent.

Aeris examined his skin first, dancing over it with her moving perceptions, like the stream dances on stone, and saw that it was dried and flaking in many areas. “Tell me what the doctors say is wrong with you.”

“The two main problems are the effects of overuse of lightning magic on a biological body and a forced addiction to ether, which has also been over used on my body,” Cloud whispered.

“That explains the damage to your skin, it does feel like a lightning burn. It has been both killed and fused in spots… but a lot of the damage has been removed?”

“Grafted over with new skin.”

Aeris tentatively explored the crevices in Cloud’s side. “You are… missing huge chunks of skin, muscle, and sinew in both your sides.”

“Hojo cut bits off. The Doctors weren’t sure what to do about.”

“Surprised you still move. You’ve regrown some muscle in very odd patterns, but I’d have to find a way to break up the scar tissue and regrow a lot of your sides. Which would be easy, if it weren’t for the ether addiction.” Aeris looked further into Cloud. “Did the doctors say anything about your nerves?”

“They barely avoided screaming about them. Many of them have stopped working, malfunctioned, or stopped understanding what they should do and have started sending incorrect signals…”

“Any involuntary twitches?”

“Sometimes.”

“I figured. This would mostly be the result of all the lightning too, I think.”

“The doctors said the same.”

“Mostly, they’re fried up… you look like a radio that’s been shocked or dunked in water. Nothing knows what it should be doing so it keeps sending frantic error signals that your brain translated as pain. Fantastic lack of brain damage, though.”

“Doctors said I ended up a lot better than the other patients in the brain department.”

“It seems you did. Luck, or varied experiments, maybe. I’ll decide later when I know more.” Aeris slipped her strands or perception—her psychological sensory organs that extended from her like invisible whiskers or invisible roots, that all Ancients counted among their senses—downwards and deeper into his bloodstream. “Oh, here are the effects of the ether. Pretty addiction-typical, but worse.”

“They say that the part of my body that usually absorbs and uses air has been… blocked or altered? I forget. Blocked or altered by Ether instead and insists on taking ether, even though ether cannot sustain a body.”

“A living body,” Aeris clarified. “That’s about right. This severe lack of air in your body has caused many shut downs and failures all over… most of which they appear to have replaced or tried to treat, though nothing’s going to work if you still need to breathe tanks of ether, which has a similar constitution, but cannot keep you alive… that Professor really doesn’t know what he’s doing, if the hodge-podge mess he’s made here is anything to judge by.”

“He doesn’t, I’ve seen his notes. He skips entire parts of the procedure in his write-ups.”

Aeris shuddered. “Alright, I see what is physically happening here… and if you had been being zapped by the natural lightning of a storm and infused with… oh, something like xenon instead, I could take care of it.”

“But you can’t.”

“I don’t know how to,” corrected Aeris. “Because your nerves were damaged by magic-made lightning, and your receptors jumbled and confused by ether, which has spiritual properties and makes up a spiritual body, there’s more than your body affected. Your soul and nature are also affected, and because of that, you could be forced to reject my healing. Water will nourish a plant just fine, but boiling water will kill it. That sort of thing. What might be happening…” Aeris hummed for a while. “If it has to do with electrons... and charge… maybe if I somehow grounded… When you consider that the soul is mostly the shadow of the mind reflected in the molecular… like…”

After Aeris was quiet for a moment, Cloud whispered, with hesitation, “So there really is a soul in everything?”

Aeris slipped her perception as stealthily as she could into the area between atoms, hoping not to tangle the threads. Her voice dropped into a monotone. “The man who accepts that I am an immortal spirit of earth asks me if there are souls in humans. Yes. Here, on Spira, we have souls. For one thing, the energy of the planet—the power, or charge, dancing between all the specks of mass of the world, brought out of the earth when ground by teeth or grown in the womb, charging with charge-- that is in all living things. We are all made up of electricity, of energy, and that is an untamable, nonmaterial force. Energy is life-force, and it makes matter dance, and so all human bodies are bound with a will to live, with movement pulled out of the ground. Second, the mind casts a shadow backwards and forwards called memory—it recalls and predicts other lives through the impression those lives has left, and the mind imprints its desires on the body and convinces it this way and that, convinces it to die, to live, to change or to remain—the power of the mind bends a fabric invisible in space, and that pressure, human-shaped, on the dimension of energy, magic, and power, is the moving soul. To see the world through the eyes of the Lifestream, which sees always the dimensions of energy and power, sees great spheres of magic constantly pulling energy in from and out to the world around them, because they desire, and their desires, positive or negative, cast shields of positivity or negativity around them that differently charges the world of magic around them—that is the power of the human soul.”

“Okay,” said Cloud.

Aeris dropped her hands to Spira, and opened her eyes. “I have an idea of what I could do,” said she, her voice brightening with every word, as her pupils dilated to adjust to the sunlight, “but it will take some time, and I apologize if I make mistakes. I can’t do it all right now anyway, the sudden change would kill you.”

“What would you do?” asked Cloud, who felt more than a bit confused and overwhelmed.

“Attack the project like it is a most monumental, impossible undertaking, and convince every one of your nerves, by name, to regrow, and every receptor in your blood and brain to forget ether and re-allow oxygen, and every forgotten cell of muscle and skin in your sides that they want to come back, based on almost forgotten data hid deep in the tiny memory banks of your clever body. If there is a more efficient way, I will find it in ex… practice. You SPIRITs,” said she, in a strange tone, “Were shoddily but thoroughly made. I am untangling a knot like the knots of grass-roots, in an effort to replant you into healthier soil before you wither.”

“Well, I haven’t withered yet.”

“Good, because this will take time,” said Aeris, standing and wiping her hands off on her skirt. “I took the liberty of healing your feet of wounds and convincing your skin to register pain, but not your bloodstream, which will demand ether. Don’t ask me how. I think I cheated a little,” she admitted. “For now, let’s walk to a nice camp site I remember from the way up here. Once you are sleeping, I will begin healing work.”

“Will you not sleep?”

“No,” said Aeris, and let the mystery rest there.

Cloud stood shakily, and Aeris knew better than to offer him a hand. He appreciated the view of the sun set for a while, which spread wide over the Calm Lands like a silk skirt stretched thin and transparent over the floor. He stretched his muscles, which seemed to experience the sensation as odd, unexpected pressure (but would probably be screaming at him if uninhibited.) “Lead the way,” he said.

Aeris did so trippingly, pacing the wide plains with the tips of her toes, as if floating. She moved silently, and Cloud trundled behind her, enjoying the warm air and the pleasant sight of the horizon turning colors from shimmering red to deep violet and indigo, like the variegate colors of a beetle’s wings.

After about an hour, Aeris found a boulder not far from the mountain, where an old wooden hut, clearly used by a traveler, was built, or perhaps propped, against the rock’s smoothest face, so that its rusty-hinged door would face the dawn when the sun rose. Outside the houses there was a fire pit with a metal grill, a garden where vegetables would grow some years if anyone had means to plant them, and a line for hanging up laundry (which Aeris said could be washed at a spring about a mile away.) Inside the wooden door with a sign that said ‘all travelers welcome,’ there was an unlit room with a grass—covered floor that sported a heap of blankets and rugs and one battered cauldron. “Sometimes there’s much more,” said Aeris, “Sometimes absolutely nothing. Depends on who went through earlier, and how much they had to survive with.”

“It smells a bit odd,” said Cloud, who was starting to tire from the walk.

“Yeah, let me clear out the fungus,” Aeris said, lifting her right hand to do so. After a bit of green light and humming, she declared the room safe, and began to pull out blankets for Cloud. “Should this be fine, do you think?” she asked, fretting over the bed.

“I’m not exactly used to chocobo down pillows,” said Cloud. Aeris chuckled. “It’s fine with me. You should know that I’ll probably be tossing around for a while, though. I don’t really sleep well.”

“Not if I put you to sleep right away.”

“You can do—” Cloud shook his head. “Of course you can do that.”

Aeris smiled silently and stood to help him undress, since it was a hassle to navigate both clothes and a tank of ether. Eventually, he was settled down in his underclothes and beneath the old, tattered quilts, sewn in the triangular patterns native to his own Thunder Plains people, his tank beside him and the mask loosely laid on top of his face. “Are you ready?” Aeris asked.

Cloud nodded. She laid a hand over his face, and silently requested that he close his eyes. After that, he heard a noise for a few minutes—a noise a little like the gentle whistle of a wine glass being made to sing by someone dragging their finger around its edge, and sort of like the buzzing of winged bugs, and sort of like the quiet sighing of moving rivers. It was a sound of melodious movement, and it sounded like what the rush of blood in the body would sound like if the body was chimes and crystals.

It faded from a noise to a place as Cloud went from awake to dreaming.

Aeris spent the night examining his inside, becoming more and more convinced that she had picked up an impossible job. This gave her hope, since her quest had proved impossible for a thousand years. Only this man had a sickness inside him complex enough to accurately compare to the disease, her enemy, and only he, who had been tortured, could give her the wisdom to end the pain.

 

-

 

The next day was taken up in monotonous steps down the endless paths of the Calm Lands, unmarked by road and navigated by the sun. There were no other travelers, since it was getting closer to autumn and the Calm Lands froze in the winter. The fields and hills there were vast, and in the sterile and merciless winter, plagued by constant winds, they meant death.

But for now, everything was covered in grass, tiny flowers, and moss, which Aeris skipped over with cheerful abandon, Cloud following more soberly behind with his arms hanging on to his heavy pack. Aeris had completed her temporary pain-dulling work on him the night before, promising that he would only start hurting if something was seriously wrong, but that that didn’t mean that he was in any way better. The respite of being able to smell-- not just see, but smell—the blossoming wild berry bushes that grew along cliff sides made his bitter story-telling almost feel sweet.

Aeris listened to everything he told her silently, not bothering him unless she needed a certain detail clarified. What she thought of his recollections she did not say. She did not react to their gruesomeness, nor let on how useful they were, or weren’t, proving.

(It was perhaps because of this that Cloud realized, in his heart rather than head, that Aeris was inhuman and thus deeply uncanny. She wasn’t avoiding expressing disgust for his sake; she seemed to be genuinely undisturbed. Angry, perhaps, at the atrocity of Hojo’s acts, but not shocked, as if she had never heard this sort of thing before. In the way that a centipede’s spindly limbs and curling body would instinctually repulse a human, so did Cloud’s past. But Aeris was an earth spirit, and unbeknownst to Cloud, she had felt her bones gnawed in pits of insect decomposers, and encouraged their contributions to the process of life.)

“I joined Bevelle’s army several years younger than they usually accept recruits,” said Cloud as he hiked carefully over fallen stones and prickly yellow flowering weeds, “trough the trick of not telling them my real age, name, or hometown, and knowing they didn’t care enough to look it up. I left because mom didn’t have the money for me and, like most children, I thought if I went out into the world I would be rewarded with success just for trying.

“I was in the army for a few months before I failed my tests. ShinRa considered giving me a basic service job, but then they realized that I was perfectly desirable for one of Hojo’s newest experiments.

“It’s a side note, but I found out with a bit of prying that the reason I was desirable was because I was first expendable, since I didn’t lit any contacts down on my papers, second very young and of an unmolded and moldable physique, and third, I was not from Bevelle. Bevelle, unbeknownst to most, has had water poisoned by some sort of mako accident for many years, and so people who grow up there have pre-existing earth affinities that mess with Hojo’s ether experiments. Odd that a Lifestream—worshipping boy from Nibelheim would be a better subject for SPIRIT than the Aeon—obsessed kids from Bevelle, right?”

“Odd,” Aeris agreed.

“They signed me up for SPIRIT when I was… oh, a little past sixteen. To my surprise, I was shipped out of Bevelle and right back to Nibelheim. Some twenty miles out of Nibelheim, actually, where the great Reactor sits.

“Hojo had one of his biggest labs in the Thunder Plains because they are both remote and, well, full of unharnessed energy in the form of lightning. He found out a long time ago that ether hit by lightning stirs strangely and often emits energy and magic in the reaction. He figures that the process to make Fayth involves lightning, he may be right. No clue.

“SPIRIT was, as you know, an attempt to make a Fayth that is not free but stuck inside a human body, unable to demand a contract and forced to obey his creator-master. That’s the gist of it, I think there’s something beyond it, since many of those who I saw in the labs looked nothing like Fayth and had nothing to do with Fayth. But I don’t know.”

“He was trying to make Fayth polluted in a certain way, from what I can tell,” interrupted Aeris, who was skipping her way along riverside rocks as she watched little silver fish swim in circles alongside and around her, “but I’ll have to give you the full details when I know them.”

“Yeah, they weren’t the sort of Fayth I know about, that’s for sure,” said Cloud, nodding compulsively. “When I got to the Nibelheim lab, he started easy, isolating me form the worst stuff, though it was clear that he had all the control form the start. Clear, unspoken, threatening, easy enough to ignore.”

“Hojo himself experimented on you,” said Aeris, hopping in a circle on one foot as a fish danced around her. (Cloud could not walk half as fast as she could, so she often had extra time.)

“Yes. He did so on most of us. If he ran other labs in other places without his presence, which I think he did, they were chock full of sterile control experiments just for reference, with none of the nasty stuff, so that he could know how his own games deviated from standard procedure.

“He was a mess, by the way. His notes were everywhere, there was no filing system, orderlies were there to keep quiet and make experiments happen quickly, not to clean the floors. Which were, I promise you, oddly stained.

“The initial experiments, before the mad stuff,” said Cloud, his voice edging closer to monotone, his step getting close to a shuffle as his feet picked at the tangles of pigweeds, “were partly about testing my body, and partly about trying to control me. And probably other things too, which I can’t see now.”

“Tell me everything,” said Aeris regretfully, stooping to pick a few small white flowers, “I have to know.”

“I know, I know,” responded Cloud quickly. “Well, the first thing he did was a very basic physical exam, even though I had had a physical before. A very basic exam with a few add-ons. He listened to my heart and my blood flow, tested my nerves and my muscles to make sure everything works, felt for bad lumps or under-level muscle development, weighed me, checked my eyes for bad eyesight, and took some blood. Of course. A lot of blood. Not a prick to a fingertip, he went into a vein and took a full syringe, and then covered the wound with a white bandage. A small adhesive one, but white. Just a detail I remember, I guess.

“He… asked about dietary and sexual history, of course, and… suffice to say both were scanty. He asked about allergies, vaccines, medications, and drug use, and there was nothing to say on my part. Asked about magic ability. Tested my grip and strength, poked my teeth, an x-ray scan… more than an average doctor’s physical, but it was required for the sort of digging around he was going to do.

“There was one thing particularly odd he did. I noted because though everything else sort of be excused under standard procedure, this was just off the wall, it seemed to me. Actually, I still don’t know what it has to do with anything.

                “He questioned me excessively about my mental health,’ said Cloud, sounding less monotone and more curious, as he tried to find a pattern in his own history while reciting it, “or maybe I should say my brain health, since he not only made me go over in detail anything that could be a sign of depression, anxiety, insomnia, or paranoia, or even things like obsessions or fetishes, but he also grilled me to remember any minor head injury I had ever received. Hojo asked me purposefully about whether or not I experienced almost every symptom for any disorder you can find in Shinra’s Full Mental Health manual—about every mood fluctuation, dysphonia, mental disconnection, empathetic failure or sensory dissonance I could possibly have. At the time, I was worried that he needed absolutely mentally healthy subject for his tests because it would be taxing, but… well, he knew he would absolutely break every one that came in. It didn’t matter whether someone came to him the paragon of mental health or raving. Because they would all end up the same.”

                “That…” Aeris steepled her hands in front of her face as she skipped in a semi-circle to look at him, and began walking backwards. “That is odd. I can’t immediately see why that would matter to him. Unless he just enjoyed destroying healthy people, but you said he sounded concerned about it.”

                “Very,” agreed Cloud.

                “Did he focus on anything in particular?”

                “Did he… let me remember…” Cloud stared at the blades of yellow-green-beige grass at his feet as he struggled to remember the time during the beginning of his SPIRIT experimentation. It was more defined that the middle and end of the experience, when he began to lose his mind and perceptions, but all the same, it was several years ago now. “He was concerned about many mental diseases… I remember his stressing depression and anxiety, but that’s because I showed a few signs for him…”

                “Did he ask about emotions or actions more often?”

                “Huh?” Cloud didn’t expect that question at all. “Actions, I think. He asked about habits a lot, if I had any habits ingrained into me, how they were taught to me, my sleeping habits, physical habits…”

                “And did he press on your childhood memories? Family life?”

                “He did,” said Cloud. “Now that you mention it, he did. He asked every time whether I developed my habits myself, or if my mother started it, if it was native to Nibelheim (he spent no time in the town, despite being so close to it) or if maybe some trauma caused my habits as defensive moments… but really, very few sixteen year olds have deep, ingrained post-traumatic habits.”

                “Just your mother, by the way?”

                “There was only my mother.”

                “Alright. And all this, before mostly physical experiments?”

                “Completely physical. The experimentation he did with my head was just a hobby, I think.”

                “That I know,” mused Aeris. “Destroying people is a hobby of his. But he’s very devoted to his hobby, if that’s all he interrogated you for…”

                Cloud shrugged unevenly. “I don’t spend a lot of time trying to get into his head. Just like I don’t spend a lot of time jumping into sewers.”

                Aeris tilted her head from side to side a few times, then slowed her steps to walk alongside Cloud. “I’ll consider this for a while. Just walk with me, for now.”

                So he did, as she made her steps and her breathing match his, keeping her heart in time with his, though he could not hear the harmony of flesh and blood in the same way she could. She did not have her own heart often, usually, she shared a pulse with the whole planet, which was not a beat but a turn. It was uncomfortable for her to be out of sync with her fellow creatures, like it was uncomfortable for a note to be in the wrong chord.

The sun moved above them, lighting first one side of their bodies, then the other, as they stopped in the middle of the vast plain for lunch. Cloud pulled fruit and bread out of his pack, as Aeris, to his surprise, moved her hands in a prayer and pulled a well out of the earth. Instead of sealing it back into the earth when she was done, like she planned, she decided instead to grow a wall of rocks around it and keep it as it was. “This place is lower on freshwater than I expected,” she said, “and not as hospitable as I would like for those brave ones that come through here to face Sin. It used to be so much nicer.”

“Really?” asked Cloud.

“It was actually one of the Ancient’s homes, many thousands of years ago, though we were nomadic, and went all over Spira, to every continent across the face of the globe, encouraging things to grow and rains to fall, since clouds were scarcer in those days,” she said quietly, he eyes roaming across the broad blue sky over the silent and unsettled plain, “but here, on the Fields… they were just called the Wide Fields in those days… we didn’t have houses, but we set up buildings here anyway, for shelter, and greenhouses, and baths, like exotic hotels, filled with ferns and clothes for any traveler, since we enjoyed filling up the landscape with lovely things, both built and growing… I remember groves of twisted desert trees, perhaps to the west… yes, certainly, west that way. And the pillared houses, like temples, but for the feet of ordinary men, covered with vines, warm through the powers of the reflective roofs of crystal, which sent rainbows spiraling everywhere, and there were rivers running like veins through the Fields that we brought up… apparently they’ve almost all dried, now. Well, we knew that Spira often changed, over the ages, and that the things we did would not last. Our only long-term work was to encourage plants to grow—and I tell you, this was once a land of stones.”

Cloud stared over the flat horizon, imagining a million years of lands, of changes, of the feet of Ancients walking, imagined the plains dotted once with bare rocks instead of its current green cliffs, once with temples, perhaps covered in trees, maybe cultivated with golden grains by farmers… “It’s incredible,” said Cloud, “how old Spira is.”

Aeris nodded. Her voice was wispy and quiet, like a slow breeze, delicately enjoying the toss and turn of the leaves in the trees. “Humans have some half-dozen ages, from childhood to adolescence, to young adulthood, through a few stages to true maturity… the Planet has thousands of ages, each more developed than the rest, piled on top of each other in their layers of stone… it changes constantly, and is a different world every thousand years, and every thousand years is more complex, with older, more entangled roots, more inventive creatures, more rich and strange lakes with older and larger creatures.”

She stood, stretching her limbs, looking out of a while at the lowering sun, which was just beginning to cool in the afternoon. “Let’s hurry on, we could be to Macalania in three days at this rate, if we keep walking steadily.”

For the most part, they were quiet that day, Aeris smiling at the sky and Cloud musing to himself, head turned down, like he was used to. They walked side-by-side, lost to each other, full of individual worries, but overall, content. What dangers and trials they headed for were miles and months away, and they could be endured then.

They lay beneath the towering cliffs that night, on beds of soft moss, as Cloud slept and Aeris healed his feet and tried to coax his nerves and his head to listen to her and give up their need for ether. She had success coaxing the muscle and skin of his sides to a slightly normal shape (by degrees, she reminded herself, not too much right now) but the rest of his body sent itself into frenzies and cries when she tried to touch it, rejecting her foreign influence, clinging to its addiction. Every part of him flinched away from her, even when she tried to appeal to his sleeping mind or soul—curious, since she knew the waking Cloud admired her as an Ancient and at the very least tolerated her as a personality. If she didn’t know better (and she did, because she would know it if this were true) she would think that Cloud was a host for some other spirit that was rejecting her. Could it all be the influence of the ether, and the air-affinity he was suffused with being unwilling to be grounded?

“So strange,” Aeris murmured, poking around his bones. Everything inside him had hazy edges, similar to a victim of a virus that melted insides, since all the Ether was trying to convince him to a gaseous state—but without magic excitement (which Hojo had tried to replicate with lightning, it seems) he wouldn’t transform, alive or not. And his body seemed to have its own preferences, and they ran against her intentions.

She closed her palms into loose fists, returning to herself to think. The thing that still disturbed her was how eerily he was alike to Sin. How very well Hojo had replicated Jenova’s work without her toxins, and with very positive, magical elements, no less.

“I’ll have to explain to him a bit more about Jenova and Sin before we hit Chasamaecum,” she muttered to herself. In fact, she probably should have told him more already, but he was in his own history now, divulging his story to her slowly, and she wouldn’t tie their two threads together by interrupting him. Perhaps it was silly to abide to the laws of Cetra story-telling myths ten thousands of years after the Cetra had become the Ancients, and then became myths, but to her, interrupting a story was a sin as perilous as taking a life. The Cetra, oral culture and culture-creators, cared much for their stories. And more for their favorite characters.


	3. Chapter 3

Aeris stretched herself out happily when the sun finally broke above the horizon, enjoying the feeling of muscles and sinew. She stepped out from beneath the shadow of the cliff, and began calling up a well for Cloud when he awoke.

It had only been some six hours since Cloud fell asleep, but she couldn’t force the insomniac, even the healing and taxed insomniac, to sleep any longer than he could. He soon walked out, bleary-eyed, muttering, to her side, and dipped his small, metal cup into the crystal-clear, bubbling well.

“Tastes like Nibelheim water,” he grumbled, “untainted.”

“Well, it came right from an underground reservoir last touched by surface creatures about half a million years ago,” Aeris commented lightly.

“That’ll do it,” said Cloud.

They ate breakfast quietly, Cloud wondering why Aeris ate but did not sleep, and Aeris not thinking about much, but watching the sun. “It’s been very red lately, but no rain,” she mused. “There have been storm clouds farther back up the plains though…”

Cloud squinted to follow her line of vision, and eventually he picked out a line of darkness drawn in the north sky. “Storms roll down off of Gagazet into the Calm Lands often enough,” he said. “I would watch the clouds circle down the mountainside, leaving ice behind them…”

Aeris smiled softly. “It’ll probably catch up to us by this evening, then. I forgot how slow the weather was here. Even when I come up to surface, I usually spend my time in cities bugging government men and business tycoons to listen to me. I head back to the Lifestream when I start sounding too much like one of the paranoid men with the doomsday sign around his chest,” she sighed, lifting her cup of water to her lips.

Cloud chuckled. “I wonder why they don’t take you seriously.”

Aeris frowned. “What ever happened to respect for your elders, I ask you.”

“Well, they might not guess by looking at you that you’re very old. Or very sane.”

“Heyyy!” Aeris narrowed her eyes and placed one hand delicately on her chest. “It isn’t my fault that they’re all fools for a lovely face.”

Cloud just chuckled, shaking his head Aeris sighed and went back to her drink.

After a minute, he stood, his joints creaking but not aching, and the minty grass chill with morning dew between his toes, and said, “Well, if a storm is gaining on us, we should try to get ahead of it.”

“Good idea,” said Aeris. She stood in one fluid motion, as if the air helped her up. “Get everything packed and get fully dressed, I’ll remind myself of what direction we’re going.”

“What direction are we going?”

“Southwest til we hit Bevelle, through the Macalania Woods, where we’ll stop and discuss future plans. It’ll still take a few days to get across the plains, so if the storm is strong enough to come to us, it will hit us.”

“Will the storm encounter the invisible power of an Ancient who is kind enough to keep is dry?”

“It just might,” said Aeris, glaring into the sunlight.

They finished eating and packed their belongings quickly, setting out across the Calm Lands, which looked just like they did the day before. The monotony would tire some, but Aeris had been familiar with the land for thousands of years and she remembered its individual curves and crevasses—and Cloud was a patient man, able to endure a pleasant landscape easily if it was just devoid of his usual pain. No amount of calm dullness will annoy a man who has been tortured as long as it is decent and nice to look at. He can occupy himself by staring at interesting wallpaper if it does not hurt him.

As the afternoon wore on, the air, which both were attuned to with their senses, one by expanded sense and one by altered, began to smell and feel more and more like rain, as the individual gases of the air got excited and charged, and the winds of the sky began to carry the scent of cool water. Just once, Aeris saw and Cloud felt a small group of Fayth soar above them in front of the clouds, enjoying the breath of the wind in their silent lungs, like great invisible birds, filled with the joy of flight.

After a while, when he felt Aeris’s expectation, Cloud began to speak again.

“After the initial examination,” said Cloud, “as I was entered formally into the SPIRIT experimentation program, I was settled into a sort of four-room dormitory in a wing connected to Hojo’s office by a metal door that was opened and shut by a code key. He had the master key, we all had temporary keys that he could allow or freeze as he pleased. It was, as an excuse and also as part of the reality, necessary for sanitation reasons. The chemicals and waste of our daily life could not easily enter the laboratory.

“It was a new building, built recently by a very old lightning reactor. The reactors are glorified lightning rods, which the Thunder Plains have been using and replacing for hundreds of years.”

“Much longer than that, actually,” Aeris murmured.

“This particular rod is pretty old, said Cloud after nodding. “It’s rusted and frayed, but the outside metal of a rod—usually about three or four stories high—says nothing about how well they work. I was inside that rod a few times as a very young child, since it is our energy source and a bit of wonder for most country people, so my mom thought of it almost as a cultural sight. Inside the rod, which widens at the lowest story, is a reactor that catches the lightning—since the lightning is nigh constant, this is enough energy to power the town, though power does run out occasionally. Usually when the reactor overloads and we have to send someone down to take care of it, so that takes a good twelve hours to fix.

“Anyway, the laboratory is in the reactor’s back yard, connected by many tubes and wires to the power source. People were worried that Hojo would take all our power for a while, but he clearly worked something out, though I don’t know what he did to balance the power source out. Maybe he uses Mako energy as well, I never saw.”

“Was it a coincidence that you ended up at a laboratory twenty miles from the town you grew up in, or was it planned?” Aeris asked.

Cloud shrugged. “The coincidence is that he chose Nibelheim as the place to build his lab, really. There are a lot of out-of-the-way Thunder Plains towns he could have chosen just as remote as Nibelheim, and like I said, Hojo did look for country boys unpolluted by Bevelle’s water.”

“Right,” said Aeris.

“The Lab itself was built out of bright silver metal and occasionally painted over white. In the new, minimalist Bevelle style, not the plains style, so it was very dull and disconcerting to a lot of us. I remember there was one boy who couldn’t keep quiet about white hallways. The rooms were uniform in the dorm, each held four of us, with two bunk beds and a bathroom attached, several closets, a wooden floor, and not much in the form of creature comforts. There was a main room where we had a television, a bookshelf, and a few other things. We were given adequate groceries to make our own meals in the small kitchen. Accommodations weren’t great, but Hojo and his funders knew that they had grabbed us all out of the Army, where things were even less comfortable.

“The dorm connected to Hojo’s office, which had the only door to the outside, and through which you had to walk through to go outside, or to any of the labs. The Office connected to the dorm through its east door, and to the nice lab through its west door. Through another door in the nice lab, you got to the bad labs.

“For the first half a year of experimentation, I only saw the nice lab. I suspected, and then knew that the bad labs existed, but I didn’t guess how bad they were until I went there. He didn’t send too many of my fellows to the bad lab before he sent us all in a batch, not unless they misbehaved, which I never did. He said some people had to enter the ‘long experiments’ early because of physical factors, but we managed to notice that only the disruptive ones had physical factors.

“I’m getting a bit ahead of myself,” sighed Cloud, staring at a batch of bluebells, swaying slightly, as he passed them. Wispy white clouds were just building up behind his head now. “There were fourteen others with me when we arrived, so one bed was unused. They were mostly older than me, but no one was above nineteen, and there were some boys still younger than me. I have never been a social person, and I am less now, but I bonded with the boys in my own room, since I was in the room with the youngest, and some of them were scared and homesick. I also made friends with one of the oldest there, whose name was Zach, but I think he was friends with everyone.”

“The friendly sort,” said Aeris with a smile.

“Just like a big dog,” said Cloud absently. He paused. “He’s dead now.”

“Oh,” said Aeris.

Cloud waited for a contemplative minute to talk again. Not because he was forcing back tears, because he was wresting with the force of starting his long story once again. “How the experiments started. Some of the more paranoid boys eventually insisted that everyone share what Hojo did to them during the hour or so every three days he worked on us individually (no, I don’t know when he slept either) and it seemed like we got more or less the same treatment in the beginning.

“He would have us walk in to the office whenever we were scheduled, question us about our day from behind his desk, and open the door to the good lab whenever he was ready.

“I only once in a while heard sounds or smelled things from behind the door to the bad lab, which was several doors and curtains down the way. They were always foul. I pretended it was storage for a while, and refused to think that there were people there that I never saw. Hojo’s helpers were a rare sight to us new recruits, they mostly stayed in the other labs, where Hojo spent his nights.

“During those days, he would check everything he would in a normal check-up before he started experimentation, every time. He only showed such scientific rigor when holding up a farce of decency, I promise you.”

Cloud’s voice was suffused with hatred whenever Hojo was his subject, no matter if he spoke quietly or calmly. There was no way to pretend he was unaffected. He limped more as he spoke, and Aeris slowed without looking like she was slowing. “After the basic check-up, he grilled us about how we were getting along with the other boys—focusing especially on whether the others ever acted out, and what we thought about them. I betrayed my dislikes and my preferences whether I wanted to or not. And at the time, I was certain it was important to follow procedure for the best scientific results, so I obeyed the laws that had nothing to do with science to the letter.

“I betrayed my love for Zach then. We all did. Hojo knew how much we all loved him, he knew he was boundlessly energetic, a fighter, a team player, someone willing to sacrifice himself…”

“Oh,” said Aeris, again. She already knew what special attention Hojo must have treated that one to.

“I talked about how nervous and scared the little boys who lived in my room were,” said Cloud, and his voice shook for the first time. He steadied it. “I told him about how one boy—I forget his name now—was particularly paranoid. The boy questioned all of us about our experiments, surmised about the reactor, made theories about the bad labs, and ran all around the outside of the building when Hojo was back in the bad labs to measure exactly how big the rooms we never saw were. He didn’t last long, of course. I talked about who seemed to get along with who, I talked about who had an enmity that might go too far. And while I betrayed everyone and myself, my legs crossed beneath my thin hospital gown and my fingers fidgeting with the thin white paper on the examination table, he poked me, injected me with small amounts of ether and other things every day, took blood, and ran scans of my insides—mostly around my solar plexus and in my head.”

“A quick question?” said Aeris, raising a hand as if in class.

“Yes?”

“Was he ever rough with you in this period?”

“Occasionally, though at the time I didn’t differentiate the pain of average doctoring from the pain of an abusive doctor. I rationalized it all.”

“When was he abusive?” she asked.

“Just from time to time, he would jam a needle in too far, hold it for too long. Or he would ask purposefully… disturbing questions, as if they were average medical questions. About. Personal habits, feelings, future plans, mental state… and he would ask them while keeping his eyes on me, and make me look up, and then look away when he got the answer he want… he would suggest things…”

Aeris held up both her hands, palms out, her eyes closed. “I need no more.”

Cloud exhibited his jerky, compulsive nod a few times. “Okay.” He swallowed. “Now, I know he put ether in me. He named the ether, said it was the main cause of the testing. The excuse was that the tests were to see if ether harmed or altered humans in any way. He said the little bit we received in testing could be easily counteracted by a little therapy, if anything went wrong. But it shouldn’t, he was just seeing how a tiny bit of ether changed the workings of our body in tiny ways, so that he could guess what a lot of ether could do. Which, looking back, had some truth in it.

“Of course, we weren’t the first subjects. We were a batch after several years of batches telling him what might work and what would not work. I’m not sure what good the six months of quiet prep work was, but after time he had clearly decided they were either necessary or useful. And no, I don’t know what the stuff was that wasn’t ether that went into me.”

“None of it caused the damage that you have now. That came later?”

“Of course.”

“In the bad lab.”

“Of course. But it was six months before I ended up there, and until then, it was regular check-ups, nausea and cramps from the ether, and a fairly boring existence. We weren’t allowed pain killers for fear of reactions, but we were told our parents were being paid good money for our sacrifice, so few of us cared. Very fortunate soldiers didn’t end up as SPIRITs. Neither did very good ones, but that’s beside the point. Some boys, the paranoid one I mentioned earlier and a few with behavioral issues, ended up in the bad labs sooner than we did. We stopped wondering loudly about the other experiments Hojo did (which we were told were all classified military work, which, actually, they were) and started just murmuring about them.

“In six months, we had all the testing preparation we needed. One, just one of us was found unfit and quietly sent back to ShinRa. I remember how upset he was,” said Cloud in a sad voice.

“They funneled us into the bad labs one by one. The youngest boy there, only thirteen, left while reluctantly letting go of my hand. He had been wetting the bed, which I told no one about, and quietly doubting that his parents would really take him back after this.

“The youngest went first, so I was the fourth in. They strapped each down to a wheeled cart in their individual cell before pulling the next in. We rarely saw each other again after that. I regret every time I did get to see them.”

Cloud shook his head. “They were awful days. We all ended up more animal than human. It wasn’t fair to see what was done to them. None of it was decent, or humane.”

“I have my doubts as to the good Professor’s humanity, if we take ‘humanity’ by its unofficial definition as ‘empathy and camaraderie for and with other humans’,” said Aeris gravely.

“If that is the definition, he had none of it.”

“Yet you do, and I do, and many humans and Ancients do, and Fayth, and Al Bhed, and Jenovines, and Rhonso, and speechless dogs curled in front of the fire all do. Hojo is the exception,” said Aeris firmly, “And not any of us. A birthplace does not make you nonhuman, nor a time, nor a physical nature, but a soul unfit does.”

Cloud looked like he was going to say something, and then paused. “You know, I was raised with people telling me that Al Bhed aren’t human. Not as a race, and not even in a… metaphorical sense.”

“No, actually, Al Bhed are, in general, fine people, and even the same race as humans! But I hear they’re teaching kids that they’re part animal these days.”

“Um… yes,” said Cloud sheepishly.

“That is actually nonsense,” said Aeris. “They’re of the human species, it’s just that their tribe moved away and adapted to their landscape so long ago that they look different. Now, in a few ten thousand years, if they stay there and evolve long enough, to the point that they were that different, once their islands drift away from the continent…”

“The Al Bhed territory is moving away from Wilderia?” asked Cloud, shocked.

“Oh, my. That’s quite a subject.” Aeris laced her fingers as she stepped next to Cloud, looking upwards and considering. “What a lot of people don’t realize about Spira, since it isn’t important, is that the land on top of the seas is constantly moving and shifting. Parts of the planet move one way, parts another, because they all rest on a great, warm, underground sea. Which is actually the most physical part of the Lifestream, it’s quite nice there. Lifestream is literal in some deep parts of the planet but in other places, we move more like… oh, I can’t even describe this. Well, the physical surface of the planet moves as the currents of the bloods and other liquids of the planet direct them, and the Al Bhed territories happen to be very, very slowly moving away from Wilderia continent, so slowly you will never see it in your life, nor would the next ten generations of your family, should you produce them.”

Cloud shifted very uncomfortably against the suggestion, and Aeris could feel the nervous spike the subject made in him. More than even talk of Hojo had.

Aeris glanced behind them again. “The clouds are building up,” she said.

Grey masses were forming behind them, rolling in swirls down the plain from the top of the mountain far behind them. The light of the sun wasn’t quite dimming behind them yet, but the pressure in the air and the chill wind increased constantly, in expectation, as bird and crickets and chittering rodents began to shush themselves. “They’ll be on us in a few hours,” Cloud guessed, “And that doesn’t sound like something I’d like to sleep in. Besides, the lightning won’t be gently guided away from us like in the Thunder Plains, so if any of that gets close to me… Do you know of any shelter nearby?”

Aeris thought for a minute. “If we head due west some miles, we’ll reach some more cliffs. After we wait out the storm, Bevelle will be due south.”

“That’s good luck,” approved Cloud.

Aeris jerked her head up haughtily and said, “and if it WERE luck, I would wholeheartedly agree with you.”

Cloud chuckled, and indicated acquiescence. Aeris smiled, and changed their course slightly, so that they were walking into the afternoon sun. It took them only an hour to find their way to Aeris’s remembered cliffs, but by then, the clouds had already made an impressive advancement onto the plains near them. Their great, billowing mass, like the sails of a ship or the smoke of a fire, spread rapidly across the heavens, and wherever they lay, the earth was dark and hazy beneath them with blue rain and grey shadows. The vastness of the plains was filled on one side with still, shimmering summer light, and on the other with quickly moving, immeasurably great power and discontent, flashing with bright white light and murmuring its growls to itself as it grew. Aeris and Cloud stood and watched the crackling luminescences for a minute before Aeris took action.

She sat down and put her palms just a bit above the ground, as usual, reminding the earth of the hands which had once brought beautiful flowers out of its dirt with gentle encouragement. She felt the stone of the cliffs and learned what it was made of, and how far down the earth it stretched, and how it had formed. She asked grace of the earth and the sky and the grass, she briefly connected, just for a second, to her home, to the Lifestream, which flooded her mind, and then she let it break like a wave.

She snapped her eyes shut, and Cloud saw the rest. Her hands rose, and the cliff—the boulders of rock and the sheer crumbling walls of dirt—they stretched, and arose, like a massive animal waiting to pounce. Aeris gently turned her hands outwards, and the rock turned into roaring, rushing, and grimy grey water, and flowed like a curving waterfall, curling into circles, madly jumping around itself and splashing pebbles, before Aeris suddenly froze it as it made a wide-mouthed, gently carved, dry cave with a perfectly flat floor and a tilted roof to protect herself and Cloud from the elements.

“Much easier with some rock already there to work with,” she commented, and then turned around to see that Cloud had fallen to his knees.

As she looked at him, he pulled his shaking hands into a movement of prayer, and then stood up again. He was awed, and he bowed his head for a second, before looking up again. Awed—but not humbled. He was full of wonder, and he shone as if blessed.

Aeris would have insisted that he not embarrass himself, but he was not embarrassed. “I forget sometimes,” Cloud murmured.

Aeris nodded gratefully. She knew what fear was, and what worship was, and the great difference between them. “I am part of the Planet which holds you and gives you a ground to put your feet on, and the Planet is glorious. Come inside, let’s eat together.”

They entered the cave side by side, Aeris hopping on the ground like a dancer and Cloud lugging his tank on his back. Aeris held his hand to help him down to the ground, as she caused little will-of-the-wisps to glow in the cave with her other hand. Cloud pulled some food out of Aeris’s pack as Aeris lit a sort of fuel-less fire to heat it. They ate, and just as they finished their dinner, rain began to patter outside the entrance of the cave, dove-grey colored rain that sparkled in the fading sunlight like little crystals. They watched as the fluttering rain slowly turned, by degrees, into a downpour, a new deluge brought on by every gust of wind. When the cave grew chill with the cold air and the dark outside, Aeris lite a white fire all around the circular borders of the cave to warm it. When lightning began to flash, and thunder shook the floor of the earth, they turned away from watching the rain and began to talk.

“How long do you think we’ll be in here?” Cloud asked.

Aeris shrugged. “This storm will last quite a few hours, and it will be night by the time it’s done. You’ll sleep at nightfall, and whenever you wake up, we can leave. We’ll be in here as long as we like, in summary.”

“Ah,” said Cloud. Aeris shuffled around so that she sat beside him, and they both spent a few minutes in their own heads. They were both, of course, of a quiet nature, though in different ways, and their conversations were often more comprised of pauses than words.

“My room in the back lab,” said Cloud, “was an isolated cell, like everyone’s. I was brought there sedated. Hojo told me not to worry about the experiments, I would be put into a long sleep for some time, and when I woke up in another six months, the experiments would be over and I would be free to go. That was the first time he mentioned anything like that. I couldn’t have possibly gathered my thoughts about such a decision in the time he expected me to make it, in retrospect, and besides, he didn’t really expect a decision out of me. He let me mumble my ‘okays’ and then jabbed me with tranquilizer before I expected it.

“As I fell asleep, I felt incredible regret and sorrow. I still felt it when I woke up—maybe a few hours later, I’ll not be sure how long anything took from here on out—but the feeling was replaced with panic gradually as more and more of my senses woke up.

“I couldn’t imagine that it had been six months already, and I was right. I was not surrounded by a group of smiling aides ready to help me up, tell me it was already January, and lead me to my waiting, beaming mother outside of the lab. I woke up alone, in a grey room with only a desk, a table, and a cabinet, and I was restrained to the table by my wrists and ankles. The restraints were metal, they were comfortable enough, but they were very thick and strong. There were no IVs full of nutrients and liquids around me, and nothing for me to contact help with. It was clear I had not been asleep for six months, and something was wrong.

“I called for help and no one came. I waited for some time, and no one came.

“Again, I cannot tell you how long it was. I don’t remember every detail well anymore; it’s possible I have forgotten entire atrocities under the weight of others. And sometimes I was well-drugged, and time seemed to stretch for longer than it should have, and some memories I have blocked and warped so that they are out of their proper time frame, and after just a little time in the laboratory, my sense of time was no longer accurate and functioning.

“I stared at the featureless grey walls, wide eyed, until they seemed to warp and twist. All I remember from that hour when I woke up alone was a slow, curdling fear that did not let me out-right panic, but fermented inside me. I remember fantasies about what could have gone wrong with the experiment, but I never yet admitted that the experiment had been a lie. Though I knew. Even someone willfully in ignorance, who chooses not to think about the signs, saw all of the signs, and the part of him that considers these things, the unemotional, pure ability to reason deep inside, has figured everything out, and waits for the rest of the mind to turn around and see it, hidden in the shadows.

“Maybe I was actually a bit of a dull child.

“After some time, he walked in himself. He had a knife. It was perfectly clean and unused, he set it on the edge of the table. ‘Good morning,’ said he, smiling. Have you heard his voice?”

“Not yet,” said Aeris.

Cloud hummed. “Imagine whatever thing it is that sits in the comfortable chair of your nightmares—though I doubt you’ve had one in a long time—whether it’s the faceless man, or the grinning black dog, or the clown in a red suit, or the floating head with no eyes, the coalesced shadow, whatever it is. The thing that sits in the corner and tells you to not look and go the other way. Imagine it opening its mouth to speak to you.

“I waited for him to say ‘sorry about not coming in here right away, you woke ahead of schedule!’

“He said, ‘are you ready to begin?’

“I said yes, oddly enough. If I remember right.  Said yes because I was scared. I don’t know what I thought was happening. He opened the closet and pulled out a tank. A lot like the one I have now. Said it was pure ether, and he’s leaving me to breathe it in for a minute.

“So he started without any introduction. I was strapped up to the ether tank, and left to breathe it in. Now it couldn’t have been just ether, or the oxygen depletion would have killed me, but all the same, I remember my lungs burning, and my vision filled with black holes that boiled green at the edges, and I remember green fires bursting out on my skin that itched and burrowed into me and made it feel like my skin was tearing up… and then after what felt like a few hours, but could have been any amount of time—I don’t know whether I stayed conscious, I was definitely delusional from the high too—he came in, and he didn’t look right to me. I was probably hallucinating, but he was made of big, blurry, black-and-white shapes… he unhooked me from the machine, said something, and left me to recover.

“For some days, it was like that. He had to get me used to the ether overdose before he could do any more experiments. When the tank wasn’t on me, I stared at the ceiling of the room, and I all I did was lay there and feel my shock and pain over and over. Sometimes my eyesight left me, and I was blind. It always hurt to breathe. I was sick once and vomited, but since I was laying down… and my skin itched the whole time. I had hives break out because of the ether, and they were left as they were. It took two days for him to remember that he had to strap me up to a nutritional drip, and give me water, or I would die. Or maybe he did the initial dehydration on purpose. I’ll never know. It was very hard to tell what was negligence and what was a test.

“After a while of the ether overdoses, once the high was less of a temporary and more of a permanent state, and I had an acceptable concentration of non-native gas in me, Hojo began trying to turn me into a Fayth. His theory, at the time—he told me in pieces, perhaps to see me react—was that a human who is filled with ether, when put into such pain that they would normally die, but cannot as they are chained to their body, will sort of… ferment inside, and their soul will turn into a Fayth inside their body when it curls in on itself and attempts to die It’s supposed to be a sort of soul-implosion..

“So that’s when he started cutting the skin and muscle off of my side, slice by slice, as if he were carving up a roast. He would put the ether tank on me, pull out his favorite knife, which I am almost certain he used on everyone, wait for me to start sobbing, and then begin carving pieces out of me in an attempt to make me die inside.

“It’s almost a shame that his theory was wrong, since he so totally succeeded.

“That was the beginning. These simple physical experiments lasted for as long as he surmised that repeated work whittling at my endurance would produce results. When it didn’t, he changed tactics.”

Cloud expelled his breath in a heavy sigh, as if breathing a storm cloud. Aeris put up her arm. “Enough,” she said. “I have quite enough to think about already. The story can continue tomorrow.”

“I can continue it now,” said Cloud.

“No need,” said she, “we have plenty of time, and I’d rather consider a few things you have already said.” She lowered her hand half way, so that her palm was lightly turned toward her midsection, a gesture of waiting. “Do not think I have pulled unpleasant conclusions out of your memories,” she whispered. “I knew already the emotions you had been through, if not the experiences. The fact of your person has not changed for me, and I won’t consider you more or less highly than I have.”

“I know. I know,” said Cloud quickly. “I don’t believe any Ancient lacks in wisdom or discernment. It’s only…” he swallowed. “It’s like having a nightmare around someone then seeing them in the morning again. You’re embarrassed. You’ve heard a lot from me now.”

“And I’ll hear more,” she said brightly. “You won’t shock me. I won’t be appalled by shows of emotion or offended by an unfortunate past.” She tilted her head. She had let down the fires over time, so that the cave was very dark now, and he only saw the soft outline of her features, of her curved and round face with pale contours, and of her bright eyes, that were like pools of water, and glowed too shrilly in the darkness. She did look more animal than woman in the dark, but she was a gentle animal, a crouched deer or sighing bird. “You’re not going to stop thinking these sad things, are you?”

“I haven’t stopped in years,” said Cloud.

The storm has stopped growling and started shushing about five minutes ago, its occasional deluges thin and hissing on the damp ground instead of smacking into it. Aeris cast her keen gaze out at the falling water, as if considering it, then turned back to her companion. “Your head will go in circles now. It would be better to go to sleep, and let dreams straighten you out, at least for another day in the morning.”

It occurred to Cloud, though for some reason it hadn’t before, that she could just put him to sleep. He knew, however, that she would never put her will above his. An ancient spirit, he had always been taught, has a static nature—what they are, they are, and they will not alter their selves to betray you. The thing that complicated the soul of the Ancient, though, was that it was as large as the world, and being static didn’t mean as much when one was statically everything. He wondered how Aeris’s personality was tied to her being—if Ancients had the same sort of personality, they who were not individual minds and were tied to a whole planet—and for a second he sized up her animal eyes, wondering.

He didn’t feel disillusioned, he would always conceive of Aeris as holy—but something about her in the darkness paled the image of her as pure. Pure in the sense that she was of a totally kind soul—she was boundlessly kind, but not totally kind. And yet he knew she would always be kind.

Do immortal spirits make their choices about how they will be, he wondered. Do they fight with warring natures like us? Looking into Aeris’s eyes, which were peaceful, but thinking of her voice, which was too calm in the face of atrocity, he wondered, without really thinking of the question as it came across his mind, what kindness and compassion were.

“I might stay up for a while,” he asked, “just thinking.”

Aeris screwed up her nose and put her hands on her hips. “If you promise not to think upsetting thoughts about how now you’re nervous around me and now you’re upset about daring to tell someone about all the pain you went through, then fine. But don’t exhaust yourself!”

Cloud tried not to wince. “I promise. I’ll just sort of sit around for a while.”

Aeris nodded. “I’ll go out for a bit in the rain, then. If you want help sleeping, just say something, I’ll hear.”

Cloud didn’t quite see Aeris disappearing after she walked some steps away from the cave into the rain, but he didn’t quite miss that it happened either.

He had stared at the faces of immeasurable evil power and ill intent before, but he had never seen untainted power like that which was in Aeris. Perhaps “power” wasn’t the word either—it was movement. Aeris was kinetic movement, the buzz of soaring insects that do not pause or land, the endlessly rushing river, and the wind tearing across the plain—she simply moved, and that was her great power. And yes, of course, a natural element—is, oddly enough, what a human would call unnatural.

Though it escaped Cloud’s mind sometimes, he remembered clearly now that she was literally older than the hills, older than the way the continent looked now, older than the cliffs and mountains digging into the ground—and Cloud boasted some years over twenty to his name.

“This is why the spirit does not mingle with the human often,” he said sourly, fiddling with the knobs on his ether tank (he had begun to enjoy being able to change his ether intake without getting a migraine). He was growing tired, but more than that, he was suddenly, and again, very uncertain. To be an abomination is not something one gets over easily or quickly. He felt sick, and he wasn’t sure why. He knew several reasons why he would possibly feel sick, but they were all small reasons, and they were all old reasons, and the feeling like rotting and rusting and bubbling acid in his gut was current and consuming, and the old ‘you’ve been through a lot’ was a weak medicine now that he had grown immune to. His cooling words to himself went harsh quickly, and he sat there, cyclically wondering, unable to think any sentence except “I am sick” over and over.

He was dully aware that trauma will be traumatic every time you remember it, no matter how long it has been rationalized. Just like in chemistry, nothing is lost in memory.

Aeris came in after an hour. Cloud had not moved. She was covered in rain and in the tuffs of feather flowers, and she seemed to be faintly glowing. “Are you tired now?” she asked politely. “It is late.”

“Yeah,” said Cloud, who considered turning to look at her, but balked from the expected pressure and pain of moving. “I suppose I’m not going to get anything else done awake, am I?”

In the total darkness (which Cloud hadn’t noticed falling) Aeris’s movement toward him was silent and swift. She bounded to him like a horse and knelt in one fluid motion, her hands rising as her legs fell. “Lie down,” she said softly.

Cloud did as she asked, laying down in his clothes, since they no longer had any bedding with them. Aeris didn’t complain about the unorthodox sleeping method, but turned her hips so that she was looming over him with her upper body when he settled down onto the dirt floor.

Aeris passed her hand over his eyes. Cloud relaxed, feeling the sort of heaviness that a tranquilizer drug would instill in him lowered upon him like a blanket, weighting on his eyelids and seeping into his limbs. The sensation wasn’t buzzing, or dulling, like a drug would be, but just relaxing, as Aeris deliberately went into his muscles and told them to loosen and settle into a motionless sleep state. Cloud breathed out slowly. With another pass of Aeris’s hand (which he felt in three dimensions, as if she passed through him, but did not see with his shut eyes) his thoughts started fading, drifting into darkness like a boat slipping into the sea at night. He didn’t feel the rest of Aeris’s coaxing work on his brain, but it took only a minute to set him into a deep, paralytic sleep.

Aeris sighed, and enjoyed the near-silence for a second, with the whispering rain splashing outside in the litt8le puddles it had formed and the absence of buzzing human thought as well as the great openness of the cave air, like a waiting music-hall of excellent acoustics now that Cloud wasn’t filling it up with its animation and intensity.

Cloud had an impressive presence, though he wasn’t aware of it. He could probably make a room go dumb by walking in, though he would never know why. He carried a magnetism that cancelled every weak charge he passed by. Without his consciousness in the cave, Aeris felt the shy glittering sighs of the veins of sensitive quartz and salt that had been hiding in the rock before. She noticed a crack running deep in the ground for the first time, an old, but thin fault line in the world.

Cloud really was incredibly distracting. Part of it was that he was a SPIRIT, and Spira reacted to him much like it would to an Aeon, with hush and reverence, keeping secrets. But a part of it was that his soul was just… large, and anything it was filled with would be overwhelming. Perhaps it had been stretched out to that state, since there were lines and scratches in it.

Aeris let her distraction feed her obsession. It was a business-driven obsession, admittedly, which threatened to turn Cloud into a project, but the project was personal. She felt like someone might feel if they were dating someone who looked very similar to their ex-spouse. The scars in Cloud’s soul were formed from the same mold as Sin’s, she could swear, and would had Hojo been an immortal creature. She was almost certain he took great influence from Jenova, since what he did was clearly inspired by her poison. Inspired in spirit, of course, since he could not replicate her minute and specific use of chemicals. He could only see how she worked externally and try to replicated that crudely… crudely but well, since, though she hadn’t told Cloud before, and wasn’t telling on planning him, she wasn’t sure how Cloud was alive. No, she wasn’t just sure that Cloud should not be alive, she _wasn’t sure how Cloud was alive._

She could quietly excuse it as the influence of ether on him, making him half Fayth, and thus keeping him alive. But the ether was killing the SPIRIT, shutting down everything that accepted normal air and nutrients in an effort to become Cloud’s only substance. Cloud’s soul was that of a living human, not a dead spirit like hers, and it was housed in a body that should have died and should not have been able to move.

Once, very long ago, there was a plague on another continent on Spira, in which bodies already dying walked longer than their brain could support them, making the dead things move and shuffle and twitch with misfired, misdirected nerve signals. Cloud looked like he should be one of them. But he was not, and whatever Hojo had done to him, he had done it stealthily, and well.

It was some combination of Jenova, the Ether, and some special cruelty of Hojo’s, no doubt, but Aeris had never seen such things in combination before, and the mixture they made was baffling. Cloud felt like a maze, a maze with infinite passways, but each is a dead end, and everywhere, the walls are rotting, and sometimes, when she had been hours in healing, Aeris felt herself chasing things through his strange and infected body, as if he had worm parasites, hiding in each of his veins. The parasites his in his brain, in his nerves, everywhere—it felt like Jenova, but it did not strengthen him, it dissolved him.

And that besides, everything useful in him had been fused and melted with lightning and left to fail. Cloud hadn’t mentioned the branching shock scars all over his arms and torso, but it was clear what they were from.

Aeris contented herself with trying to soothe Cloud’s befuddled cells back into accepting air as a viable thing for breathing. Eventually, she got herself into a rhythm, of meeting, consoling, and releasing. She hoped her influence, patient and steady, borne on the thin webs that only an Ancient could weave in the body, would eventually win out over the ones that poisoned him. Working the ether out of his body was only the beginning—only when she had so healed his body that she could take the mask off his face, could she commence the real work.

She took the last hour before Cloud woke up (she could feel him stirring inside, going from deep darkness to visions of cobbled streets that she sometimes caught a glance of) healing his sides further, moving his growing muscles so that his organs could resume a less sickening position. Finally, she convinced the whole mess to not send all of its normal pain signals, so that Cloud would be able to move the next morning.

She always felt… less controlled than she would like, while working on Cloud. Because there were questions about Cloud that she had not found the answers to yet, and she knew it was entirely possible that something she did could have an unexpected, harmful reaction. She did not know what was keeping him alive, and she feared to sever its messy, tentative hold. She feared that making his body functional would kill it. Technically, that would mean that she would have success with Sin, but she had never once killed someone before, and she would not now. She was almost certain that Hojo has took something of Jenova’s, and put it in Cloud somehow, but it wasn’t the clumping, black poison she found in infected beasts—it was something translucent and quiet, biding its time. And she feared this stubborn visitor, who had kept herself alive for so much time despite the war against her, was what was doing the same for Cloud.

She left the cave so that he could wake up in private.


	4. Chapter 4

Cloud opened his eyes to brighter sunlight that he expected, magnified in the glass of every left-over raindrop resting on the edges of grass-blades and the thin hairs of spiky weeds. He closed his eyes, and adjusted his muscles slowly, trying to wake them up without making any of them spasm or cramp, since they had been resting on (oddly well-indented) stone for hours. He stretched his shoulders too far, so he lied there, absolutely still to avoid the pain increasing, and stared at his tank beside him.

Aeris had probably been adjusting it as she worked so that there was less and less ether in it, but breathing didn’t hurt more than it usually did. The thin silver contraption was more powerful than it looked. The majority of it was taken up by an inner ether tank, which mixed with normal air that was pulled in when he breathed. Technically, the air was pulled into a very small tank, which worked sort of like a dam in a river, full of locks so that the air and ether didn’t mix until it hit the breathing tube and the ether didn’t accidentally flood out through the air tube… Cloud hadn’t exactly memorized how it worked, he only knew what he had read on the extensive labels on the sides (many times, as he lied there, just like he did now.)

Eventually, Cloud managed to sit up, his joints cracking as he did so. He sighed, and made himself stretch, slowly, working his bones out of their fetal lock and into a workable condition.

Aeris found him as he was half-way through trying to attempt a squat (and failing.) “I don’t think that’s good for you,” she said.

Cloud sighed and straightened himself unevenly. “It used to be good for me. Now I can’t do it without worrying that I’m going to rip my tank out.”

Aeris shook her head. “Alright, not a normal problem, I know. Here, do you still eat meat?”

Cloud thought. “The recovery center didn’t usually get meat, since it’s expensive, so I haven’t in a while, but I like to. Why?”

Aeris clapped her hands. “Oh, good. I’ll get the fish I was talking to, then. He’s old and ready to pass on now, and you need to build up muscle strength.”

With that, Aeris gleefully skipped out of the hall and out towards the river to kill a fish. Cloud felt a little disturbed for a minute, but eventually decided that it really was the most humane way of hunting he had ever heard of. Even if it was also the most insane way.

He could see Aeris far out on the fields of the Calm Lands, crouched in the golden grass, her arms outstretched to the ground. He looked away after a while, hoping he didn’t accidentally witness the poor fish’s death.

He had sat himself laboriously back down and was massaging a thigh that was threatening to cramp when Aeris glided back into the cave, freshly dead fish cradled in her thin, freckled arms. She smiled, and said, “Hold this for a bit while I call up a fire.”

The still-wet fish, which moved like so many pounds of slime, was dumped into Cloud’s hands as he flailed around, attempting to grasp it. Luckily, it really was dead, so there was no struggle out of the poor thing—but Cloud, more repelled by the smell of wild river water and old fish than he would like to admit, ended out just pinching the fish’s tail fin with a few fingers while the rest laid in front of him, with a sort of displeased look on his face. “It’s pretty big for a river fish,” he said finally.

Aeris grinned from where she was twirling her hands over the stone ground, bringing strange white flames out of a black spot. “He’s been growing for a long time, and he’s a mako fish besides.”

“A mako fish?”

“Mako fish are considers some of the Ancient’s… um, familiars? Kindred spirits? We tend to be close to them. A school of them almost as ancient as us live in the Moonflow, and others thrive in places where the surface water of Spira is connected by abysmal pathways to the Lifestream deep below her surface—and others still swim in those pathways between Spira’s stone … this one only found himself so far into mundane waters since he got a little senile in his old age, poor guy. Kept trying to tell me about the state of youth before I sent him away.”

“Hm,” said Cloud, suddenly unable to imagine the dead fish without a pipe and a grouchy scowl. “Is something like him usually good to eat?”

“Usually, no. But I think he will be good for you, since he is infused with Lifestream energy, which is what I want you to be.”

“Ah. It should fight the ether, you mean.”

“I hope so,” said she, sliding her hand across the stone to grab the body of the fish and pull it towards her, leaving a water trail behind. “I’m going to gut this very quickly, I am very adept at the skill of butchery, so you may want to look away.”

“Ah,” said Cloud. No longer a man to take risks, he turned away. But even if he couldn’t see Aeris’s very tiny hand digging out the fish’s scales in reams and plucking bones out with dread efficiency, he could hear the small, wet sounds, and the smell of gore slowly rose up behind him like a mist. Uncomfortable, and unwilling to admit he was uncomfortable, he struck up conversation. “You know, I am starting to think that Hojo lied to me about what ether actually is.”

“Oh?” asked Aeris, as her arm, out of the corner of his eyes, wrenched something out of the fish’s carcass suddenly with a jerk. “What did he say it was?”

“I don’t remember all his babbling,” Cloud admitted, deciding to just look at the ceiling of the cave, “but what I do remember is he would refer to it as ‘the blood of the Fayth,’ as if that were its title. He seemed to think it was literally something you extracted from dead Fayth.”

“Well, he’s…” Aeris paused and she wiped some guts out from under her small white nails on a spare cloth, searching for the right words. “He’s in the right area. Ah. I hope that’s just how he poetically referred to it. I mean, that’s right, if you want to think of ether vaguely… how did this guy get his degree in doctoral science.”

“You know, I am not totally sure whether he did or did not.”

“Figures. Ether, simply, is… oh, wait, this isn’t simple. So. Cloud, where do you think the clouds are?”

“Er? Up?” asked Cloud. “I’m not really an educated man.”

“Doesn’t matter, because you are right!” said the Ancient cheerfully. “The clouds are up, in a certain circle of the air. You are more aware than most people that average air is comprised of several different things, including oxygen.”

“Of course.”

“What you probably do not know is that the composition of air changes when you get really high up.”

“Actually… I think they mentioned something like that on Gagazet.”

“Oh. Of course they would.” Aeris shook her head. “Of course. Look at this old lady getting slow. Well, on Spira, air comes in several different realms, which surround the planet like a set of rings. The lowest ring is on the surface, and it is what most people breathe. The second-lowest ring hits the tops of the mountains, and it is totally different from the lowest ring. It has some of the same ingredients, but in different amounts, and it is… shaped… differently. There’s a thing to air, to all things, that human eyes cannot quite see, since it is too small and too strange, that gives air specific shapes and weights, just like crystals and rocks have. I’ll explain some other time, maybe. Think of it as air of a different pattern.

“Above this second ring are several other rings. In total, there are seven rings of air above Spira, extending from the surface to amazing distances away, almost as far as the stars. And that is more distance, I promised, than you have ever dreamed.”

Aeris paused to form her thoughts for a second, and Cloud could hear bones scraping. “Well, these furthest rings, among the stars, aren’t very much like the air you know. It cannot be breathed, but it has a pattern, made not of gasses, but of… I’ll call energy, what you must know is that it is still a ring that surrounds the planet. There are four rings which humans, Ancients, and almost all other beings on Spira cannot touch, since we cannot live in them and cannot contain them in any containers that we can hold. These far rings are mysteries even to the Ancients—though we know about them, we, bound to Spira, cannot touch them.

“The Fayth, I know, can travel each of these rings, but they say the outer four rings are cold, and silent. The inner three rings are the rings are the ones that are air, or are like air, as you know it.

“Ether is the third ring—the ring that is air, but the furthest ring from the planet that anyone but Fayth can touch.”

“So…” Cloud said… “Ether is just another type of air?”

“Yes, but more than that. Ether is made of a lot of the things that air is, but in a very different pattern, and with very different properties. It’s like… how ice, which is the same thing as water, doesn’t do what water does at all, and eating ice is no substitute for drinking water. It’s like that, but more extreme. Ether may be related to low air, but it does not do the things which low air does. It will not fulfill the needs of human lungs, but the spirit that breathes it is fueled by its latent energy, made dizzy, excited, filled with power… ether is, just as Hojo surmised, kin to the Fayth, because ether is what the Fayth naturally breathe. Breathing ether ignites great powers in whomever breathes it (normally, I’m working on figuring out whether you’ve been granted powers or not) but if lungs breathe it, it kills the body. This is not because it is just some sort of undefined magic—just like some herbs, when eaten, unlock serenity in the human mind, ether unlocks serene and divine powers, but like I said, and you have noticed, it kills the body.”

“So, you’re saying that ether does not come from Fayth, it’s just what they prefer to breathe. And what gives them their powers.”

“Fayth have powers naturally, but yes, that is the case otherwise. They prefer it, and it strengthens them. Whereas humans often call the Fayth and their Aeons Spirits of the Air, the Ancient words for them is just slightly different—to us, they are Spirits of the Highest Air, and to them, by the way, we are Souls of the Deep. By deep, they mean both deep water, deep earth, and a sense of ‘depth’ in an old, old form… deep time, deep mind, and deep understanding all connected, deep like a grave…”

Aeris laid her hands down on the completely gutted fish, glistening white meat in her hands, which was once alive. She shook her head slowly. “Next time, you should remember that Ancients are, well, Ancients, and if you give up time to ramble like old grandmothers on their porch chairs, we will.”

“Huh?” asked Cloud, startled out of his reflection. “Oh, no, it doesn’t bother me. I didn’t understand everything , but…” Cloud suddenly paused. “Wait, if it’s all the way up there, and Fayth are not made of it, how the does Hojo get it?”

“My god, I wish I knew!” said Aeris, turning around. Cloud hitched his head over his shoulder to catch her eye. “There are a few options, I don’t like any of them. It’s POSSIBLE he is somehow draining a captured Aeon of its ether, but that won’t be enough for what he needs. There are a few daring ether collectors in the world, but their cargo is worth ten times as much as gold and twice as much as dragon’s blood… the most reasonable option is the one I very much do not like.”

“And that is?”

“He’s making it,” said Aeris. “He had found a way to alchemically produce fake either. Which would explain why, though there are other reasons, it doesn’t… feel like the natural ether of a Fayth.”

“Huh,” said Cloud, sounding a bit bothered himself.

“I don’t like it,” muttered Aeris. “Ether is made with incredible complexity… it’s like re-making the ancient ceiling-murals of the old civilizations, every brushstroke… I’ll have to think about it. It’s monumental, no matter how he got all that ether.” Aeris finally turned around, shifting her weight to get her legs under her and hide the bones and blood in a pile behind her. “All right, let’s cook you an amazing breakfast.”

Cloud reluctantly turned as well, but al there was in front of Aeris was (impossibly) clean slabs of white meat and the strange, white fire. Cloud was going to suggest using some sort of rock for a pan when Aeris, with a wide grin, picked up the slimy raw meat with her bare hands and tossed it happily into the fire, muttering a quick word in a strange language as she did so.

The both stared at the results. The fish meat hissed and gasped in offended protest. Cloud looked incredulous. Aeris smiled. Cloud opened his mouth to speak a few times, as he watched the meat sputter around a start to turn colors, and finally said, “I begin to suspect Ancient cooking is a little different from cooking as I know it?”

“Hm?” asked Aeris with confusion. She looked up, tilting her head. “Well, logically, it would be. Why do you say so?”

“Never mind,” said Cloud quietly.

 

-

 

After a surprisingly delicious (if plain) breakfast, Aeris shuffled Cloud out of the cave to return it to its former state as an average cliff. “No reason to leave it like this if it’s more comfortable otherwise,” said she.

As she lifted her hands to take the stone and release it from its new shape, Cloud looked around the Calm Lands. As always, they were flat, and unremarkable in form (though incredible in color.) The ground was less level than it had been, and was arching up to a more hilly landscape, slowly rolling like waves, broken occasionally where lightning struck or Spira moved to make a cliff or hole. Cloud could hear another river nearby (very many flowed down from the upper sea and from Gagazet to eventually reach Macalania Lake, Aeris told him) and after the storm last night, a few makeshift, muddy streams, fueled by rain and dew dripping off of the bent and pale stalks of grass, ran swiftly through the contours of the planet, bringing little dead plants and the corpses of bugs with them. Cloud, for the first time, saw, briefly, how cleverly Spira kept and cleaned herself, using the storms and fires that tossed her to get rid of everything she had outgrown.

Aeris, meanwhile, let the rock flow in heated form back to its former state, releasing it from its awkward position. As she did so, the bones and gut of a fish she left behind her were quietly swallowed into the re-forming ground. She brought her hands up in a prayer position for a while, just to feel closely the energy running form her in rivulets around her, returning to the Lifestream, pouring past… and then returned her attention to Cloud, who was, apparently, interested in a dead beetle flowing down a stream.

“That’s what we call a greenlegs beetle, actually,” said Aeris quietly, to avoid startling him, “and they are very ancient creatures.”

Cloud squinted. “Now that you mention it, I can see the dark green legs curled up beneath his shell.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Aeris. “The legend in our time was that they evolved out of several blades of grass when the grass was in crisis from large beasts trampling it, so that the new bug-grasses could infect and eat the beasts in their large numbers. We had to make up a legend for them because they were one of our biggest challenges in getting crops to grow on this continent.”

“Oh,” said Cloud. “Such a small thing was?”

“No, a swarm of tens of thousands of them were. It was a more apt tale than we realized, since the grasses of this continent literally did fight the new wheats and grains we tried to introduce…” Aeris sighed. “Well, we got what we wanted in the end, since we could appeal to the ground the plants grew in.”

“That does sort of give you the upper hand,” Cloud said.

Aeris grinned, then extended hers to Cloud. “Shall we go, then?”

Cloud didn’t accept her hand, but he nodded. “Due south?”

“Due south. We should hit Bevelle… either tonight or tomorrow, depending on how travel goes.”

“And once we’re in Bevelle?”

“Some supply gathering, some rest as I work on healing you, but our goal is further south.”

“What is out goal?”

“Nibelheim.” Aeris nervously shifted a pebble through her fingers. “I will want to look at the equipment that Hojo used in his experiments, and I have received word that he himself is not using the lab right now. In fact, no one is using the lab right now. They all left, for reasons I have not been told and am curious about.”

“All left?... I mean, all the SPIRITs were evacuated, but…”

“You are not expected to follow me into the lab. You are perfectly welcome to stay in Nibelheim if you like, or farther away if you like, while I satisfy my curiosity about those things which I want to know.”

“Yeah, I’ll probably do that. Stay away from the lab, that is.” Cloud cleared his throat.

“I won’t have to stay long either, I don’t think. There’s just a few things about the properties of the chemicals Hojo used that I want to confirm. Like I said, I don’t know how he got his ether, or what his ether really is, and I can’t assume that the stuff in your tank is the same stuff—I don’t think it IS, actually--”

“I understand,” Cloud said, putting up his hands.

“Right,” said Aeris, and they started walking south.

There were little brown birds darting through the tall golden grass as they walked, coaxed out of the southern woods and into the plains by the promise of bugs disturbed by the rain. The birds made a high trilling sound, and the preying insects that were out after their own lunch sang back to them. Cloud even saw a group of herd-beasts plodding in the distance, pulling up chunks of watery grass in their jaws to chew as the pawed their way slowly through the plains.

“The rain stirs things up,” he commented.

Aeris nodded. “That is the way it is, isn’t it?”

Cloud muttered something low in reply, without really paying attention to what he was saying. His mind was already working on the things he would tell Aeris today. “Shall I just… start?” he eventually asked.

“Go ahead,” said she.

Cloud shrugged his pack on his shoulders, scrunching up, then forced himself to unfold again. “I was left alone for a little while,” said Cloud, “after the first few rounds of cutting experiments, by myself in the little room, with a breathing tank often tied onto me. Since I wasn’t used to that yet… I remember that the mask chafed me, and by the end of what I think was a few days, I had a red ring of scarred skin on my face for a while.

“Hojo must have learned from previous experiments that just leaving humans to breathe pure ether would kill them because he left me with… I dunno, in retrospect, it must have been a half air, half ether mixture. I wasn’t debating it at the time since I was mostly sorting out all the shadowy hallucinations and perception loss the ether inflicted in me.

“When you get used to ether, its ability to turn you into a raving maniac goes down, though the pain doesn’t really. Well, the pain goes down a little. Then it comes back doubled when you try to quit. Ha. Anyway. So I was there, breathing an ether mixture, just… you know… ideally, he was going to have us breathing only ether by the end, he told me once. Of course, that isn’t possible without killing a person, which was the idea. In his head, the transformation into a bound Fayth and the total exclusion of oxygen would happen simultaneously. Simultaneity, I remember his saying that word, I can hear it. Essentially, I was to be smothered slowly to death for some years, then I was to die inside, biologically, but my spirit was to remain housed in the dead body after being turned to an immortal spirit. I

“After a few days of me watching reality blend together and sometimes tear open into mid-air rifts that spewed black bugs, Hojo walked back into my room. Well, this is all approximate, I can’t prove that Hojo did all of this, or that everything I remember happened, really. Basically, he just repeated the previous experiment, as he did for several sessions after. He continued to pull apart my abdomen, which had not yet healed but had scabbed over, hoping that that effort and the increased ether he pumped into me during the sessions would force me to die. He sometimes just left needles in, when he was gone, to keep me in pain.

“I can’t really tell you how I reacted, because I don’t remember. What I think… I remember being very subdued. I remember… once… I don’t remember when, when Hojo was working on me… a line from a story came into my head. It was a story that the adults in Nibelheim told out loud, part of a cycle of legends, that, well, they were based around the work of the Ancients. “The Old Spira Cycle,” we called it.”

“You’ll have to tell me it sometime,” said Aeris, subdued.

“I can try,” he promised, “But I’ve forgotten most of it over time. The line I remembered was from a particularly bleak story, about a plague that annihilated many ancient cities somewhere to the South. The ancients walked from city to city, and healed whomever they could. But every time they got to a new city, more and more people were dead. The tale described the grief of the survivors more and more vividly each time, starting with the ‘mourning mothers’ and ‘wailing widows’ in the first city… very standard… but by some of the last ones… there were ‘dying bodies, that heaved black tears as they were being devoured by maggots, no life left but a spirit of grief possessing their bodies’, and ‘a mad man going round in circles, running in circles, in the center of the city, where hanging gardens were dying, with a knife, killing anyone that came close to him, babbling words in no known language…’ and finally, the Ancients come across the final city, there is no one alive in the city. They walk in the streets, there are corpses. They call out, there are no voices. They look for human touch, and find the cold. They feel for the soul…

“I remember, that line had no completion. The tale-teller would just shrug.

“The line I remembered came just after that. I remembered, strapped to the table, with a knife at my side, feeling cold metal actually inside my own muscles, with wide clarity of mind… right after they see that the whole city has been killed, an Ancient woman sinks to her knees. Before then, the tale describes no emotion from the Ancients. We don’t like to pretend we know how they think, it’s considered bad form and disrespectful to describe one in ways similar to a human. But this Ancient sinks to her knees, and…

“ ‘She cried, but her sobs were hollow, and they meant nothing. There was nothing that could be done, so all actions were nothing. The passing required a kind of despair that none are capable of, and none were ever meant to express.’

 

 

“That’s how I felt, I guess. How I remember feeling. Inside. Outside, I remember feeling pain that could mildly be called ‘excruciating,’ always, since I was being tortured. I didn’t believe people for a while, after the fact, when they said I had been tortured, because I geuss you never see yourself as really being tortured, but then they described some average government torture method, and… well, anyway.

“After he stopped with my sides-- though he made sure those never healed, he required that the deep fissures in my side made it hard for me to breathe, and that it assured I was always in pain, always growing more tired, and more likely to be pushed over the edge. Less likely to have a coherent thoughts, and forced to rely on instinct instead—after the knife, he started the needles. Since needles are slow, and precise, he took the time, to explain his main goal to me plainly. Which you already know. He told me he was trying to kill me, but just inside, so I became a Fayth inside. He also said I would be a special Fayth, and I don’t know what he meant like that, unless he was interested in especially crippled Fayth.

“The needles… he learned, somewhere, how to puncture the body in certain areas, to make parts of you spasm and cramp, or go dull. They say it’s a Wutain mystery, though they don’t use it that way. He would blindfold me, so that I didn’t know what part he would chose next. Apparently—he muttered about this once or twice—he was working off of some vague idea of… energy centers in the body? Striking them in a certain motion in order to ‘unlock’ me?”

“I know what he THOUGHT he was doing,” Aeris confirmed.

“Right. After the needles, which he tried for a while, he tried setting those energy points on fire. Oil fires. It spread more than he liked every time, so he could never get it right. No, I don’t know how that was healed either. But I know it was. He healed the deep burns. The burns that went past the skin. And left other things. Which meant he, and only he, could have had me healed completely, totally, at any time.

“Ha. A ha ha. Anyway. After the fires, he switched tactics again, and for a while, he wondered if turning me into a living potion-cauldron would do anything. He fed me—and everyone else, I am sure—ingredients that often react with ether—quicksilver, dragon blood, snake eggs, and, er, salamanders. I’m… just going to leave that part.”

Aeris muttered something.

“What?”

“Oh!” Aeris jumped. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Um.” She sort of ground her teeth together, then, in a voice darker than Cloud had ever heard her utter before, she said, “ _animal bodies are not magical._ Salamanders are not magical. Infant snakes are not magical. Dragon blood is exactly the same as human blood. They are all made of the same… the same stuff. They. Argh they are just innocent animals, there’s nothing magical about them and nothing magical about taking an animal’s life, how could there be anything magical about, who would even look at a freaking Shoopuf’s tusk and think…” Aeris sighed, her lips pursed. “Pet peeve. Sorry. Continue. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

Cloud grinned painfully for a second. “Alright. Of Course. So… that’s right, the potion experiments… I call them. Obviously, that did nothing other than make me really sick. Otghers, as well, I know he did these sorts of experiments with others, since I could smell it. Actually, these were the only ones that made sense to me, since I remember the stories they sued to tell about witches in the village, making magic out of snakes and mold. He did pour glorified mold in me, and these black, slimy mushroom, and these ugly, yellow spores… yet another thing that should have killed me. But didn’t, because Hojo kept me alive. Because he needed a certain kind of death, I suppose. I never understood it. He had all these machines measuring me… I don’t know what he thought would happen to tell him that I was becoming a Fayth…”

“There are obvious indications. He wasn’t going to see any of them, but he probably knew about them.”

“So you know how to make Fayth?” asked Cloud, surprised.

“I made the first one.”

Cloud was stunned silent for a minute, walking by Aeris’s side, as she looked at him with a thin smile. “You? You mean?”

“Me. Specifically. I’ll tell you, sometime. I’ll have to, since it’s tied to a larger story.”

“Wow. That’s… unbelievable, I guess. Except it is. Because you’re. you, of course.”

Aeris considered this for a second, then nodded in agreement. “Yes,” she said. “That also. It was not all so great at the time, though.”

Cloud swallowed a few times, looking at the sweet birds which hopped around his feet, searching for food in the grass. He felt the sun lighting the plains in his eyes and warming the skin of his back. “After I was left to stew with several poisonous influences in my body,” he said, “Which I should have never recovered from, and kind of haven’t, if you think of it one way, and anyway, nothing happened in the ‘turning into a magical being’ front. After most of that was flushed from my system he decided that what his potion-making was lacking was lightning. He would pump me full of ether, then make sure to stick some needles in me or something that would hurt, and then he would pick up a lightning material (fueled with the Thunder Plains’ own power) and… to put it crudely, he hit me with it.

“He used a fully matured lightning Materia for thunderbolt, the sort that comes out in strong, fierce, storms. Not the sort that rends a house, but not a static shock either. I can’t describe how it felt, obviously. Actually, I don’t remember much past the first shock. I was really not conscious often during this period.

“He would feed me more poisons, with the ether, then shock me, hoping to… stir it up somehow? I never understood.”

“May I ask something?”

“Of course,” said Cloud.

Aeris steepled her hands. “You said he used toxins. Poisons. Do you have any clue what sort they were? Or what his reasoning was in using them?”

“Um… this is the sort of stuff I just won’t know… like I said, poisonous spores and mushrooms, big black slimy ones and little yellow spores, and later on, these dark, murky liquids in vials, of green or black or brown tone… I don’t know what they were, but I call them poisonous because they felt… well, they felt wrong. Wholly wrong, like I, all of me, I just knew it shouldn’t be in my body.”

“How did these liquids taste?”

“Taste?” Cloud shrugged. “I don’t remember things like that.”

“Perfectly all right,” Aeris said, musing.

Cloud waited to see if she would ask anything else, then returned to his story. “The… good thing was, the lightning was so damaging he could only justify trying to get the reaction he wanted after long periods of rest. But every time he came back in… sorry. Every time he came back in, it was obvious that he was more and more agitated with the failure of his theories. He would feed me more and more poison, in whatever mixtures he hadn’t tried on the rest. Then, one day, he told me… I remembering his face suddenly appearing, in the blankness, as if he had just been summoned above me, suddenly, he was there, a think face floating… he told me that he had almost had a breakthrough with one of my friends, and he thought he could succeed with me. But he was going to make conditions optimal for the experiment, since he was sure he was close to a breakthrough, and that meant… mental anguish, as well as physical. To convince me to willingly reject my own life.

“He didn’t say any of these things like he was trying to hurt me. He wasn’t grinning some madman’s smile. He was telling me about the next stage of the experiment. I don’t know, it’s why I can’t always be too bothered when I remembered him. Sometimes he’s like a demon over my sleeping chest… sometimes… he’s the doctor. I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

“He opened my door, propped it open with an average wooden door stop, and let me look out.

“You know, I didn’t know, or it hadn’t occurred to me, before then, how sound proof my little room was.

“The lab… there were several large rooms, connected, and of course, many rooms like my lined up on the edge. I could see one large room, and another room past that, then the lab kind of curved so that I couldn’t see any more rooms… just hear them.

“I heard, the second he creaked the door open a little, the pandemonium. There was every sound of pain. There were screams that rang from many, many halls away, in hidden chambers that I could not see but could only imagine, there were groans, and sounds even more strange than that. Sounds literally like breaking bones, but made with the voice. And there was raspy, or wet, or gasping, breathing from every corner, since no one could breathe… and then I smelled it, and it was the smell of gore. The smell of what crows eat, the smell of an actual battlefield. It was the scent, the sound, the muggy air of a zoo, but… well, but the exhibits were us.

“And then Hojo, with a genial smile, propped the door open, so I could see.

“I had to drag my eyes up from the floor, since light hurt my eyes, and the room was bright lit. There was… just… blood and… bits scattered on the floor. My eyes ran to the ceiling, up, and there were just bright lights that made everything dark… and I tried to look into the room, the tables, and chairs, where people were strapped or tied, and the one orderly…  leaning against the wall, taking notes, looked up at the opening door with a raised eyebrow… and everything was a black silhouette in my burned vision, like a cut-out design in a book, the bounded wounded in a macabre hospital that sometimes twitched, or spasmed, as they gasped… and my eyes slowly regained my sight, and I saw old friends… strapped down… tubes stuck into them, red sores all over them, as their eyes rolled at me, and tried to focus… and heard someone being sick… and I focused, eventually, on the person that Hojo had put directly in front of me, upwards, on a partition, like they use for sets in theatres, tied up, with scars everywhere, and this gigantic tube attached to his stomach… I still don’t know for what… his hair shaved off… and this… happy… relieved… look on his… face, he was missing an eye, and the hole was… infected… and he was glad to see me, and he said, ‘hey, Cloud.’

“And I said, ‘Hey, Zach.’”

And Cloud covered his face with his hands right after his voice finally cracked, and then, to his dismay, his legs gave out as the stress of his emotions weighed on his weak, over tasked body. It was not misery that struck him down, but fatigue, the incredible sense of being tired, that almost struck him down in a faint. Aeris had already turned around to comfort him, but seeing him suddenly bent, and crumpled, she fell instantly on to her knees, and caught him.

Cloud didn’t exactly cry. He shook, and he breathed loud and gasping like a man after an attack, and Aeris held him until he stopped. Cloud felt ashamed, but his crying was not, exactly, an emotional response, and he knew that. It more resembled physical revulsion.

Aeris soothed him silently, not with sighs and caresses but just with holding still, breathing slowly, and grounding Cloud as gently as she could. Their knees were damped by the rainwater and mud below the thin grass, and flies curiously buzzed around them.

Oddly enough, Cloud’s cries did not disturb the complacent birds and beasts which roamed the plains.

After Cloud, exhausted, leaned back on his own strength, apologizing with the little air in his lungs, Aeris quieted him, saying that they may as well stay there for the night. “It’ll be easy to get to Bevelle tomorrow,” she murmured, “In fact, look, you can already see it. If it were earlier in the day, we could even hitch a cart from the road nearby… let’s do that, in fact, hitch a cart the rest of the way tomorrow. I forgot that we could have done that once we hit this part of the Calm Lands. I’m sorry.”

Cloud continued to apologize, so Aeris opened her pack and laid out a few blankets. The sun wasn’t quite setting yet, and there was no way Cloud, so emotionally excited, would sleep for hours, but the rest was more than needed.

After some time (until the sun was far enough down on the horizon that half the sky was deep violet) Cloud considered his story in a quiet voice. He lay down, with the can of ether beside him, and though he barely seemed to notice, Aeris made a point of laying his hand over hers.

He recounted how Hojo muzzled both him and Zach so that they couldn’t talk, but left them there to watch each other for an indeterminate amount of time. Probably months. Probably a year. Eventually, they stopped looking at each other. “It was the last I was going to see my best friend, and I knew it,” cried Cloud, “but how could I look at him? And how could he look at me?” Cloud came close to dying many times, and when Cloud was blacked out, an aide would heal him (Cloud found this out from being able to watch Hojo’s other experiments on his friends. On as many of them as there still were.) “About one person would die every month, I think,” he said, “And I watched a new batch come in… four? Times? Maybe five.

“Despite everything, despite the torture, despite the sickness and… everything, seeing new boys being dragged in was the worst thing I saw. It was the worst feeling. It was the worst, every time.”

Eventually, according to Cloud, though his capacity for physical pain never lessened, his emotions dulled with time. It was terrible to see the young boys first brought in, and hear them, but once they “settled down,” Cloud stopped caring. He snarled at anyone who was too loud, he recounted bitterly. “And I tried to attack the aides, and I cursed everyone, and eventually, I stopped caring about any of them. I didn’t notice when Zach’s body was brought out. I was asleep at the time. I was just surprised to see someone else for a minute, and I just sneered at him, and then barked at him every time he whined until he shut up.

“All of us who were there a long time became like that. We all hated the new boys, and how loud they were, and we would call them… well, best to let that die. It hurt to see them, it hurt like being set on fire; they burned at us, and we jolted with pain and misery. We made sure they grew to be like us, I promise you.

“I remember, the boy I told you, who was paranoid before we were brought into the bad lab, the one who tried to convince us something was wrong? He was missing a leg that had clearly rotted off, and whenever he met someone’s eye, in that room, he would laugh at us. On purpose. Even Zach… before the end… we stopped looking at each other. We mutually stopped acknowledging each other. And there was another boy, very young, who whenever he was being worked on… he yelled at us. Not himself, not Hojo, us. He hated us all. And I promise you that we hated him. Everyone was disgusting, everyone was crippled, and everyone was the diseased and violated scum of the earth. And we mutually despised each other for what we were.

 “Sometimes Hojo… he was a professor, you know. He would walk around the lab and lecture everyone. We listened, and didn’t argue.”

Cloud recounted about four years to Aeris, in as much detail as she asked for, until the moon was directly ahead, and everything was ghostly and silver, and quiet, breathing slowly in sleep. His recollections of those darkest years were scattered and incomplete, so he only remembered the worst. He couldn’t tell Aeris, for sure, whether he had actually had extra limbs and tumors and spores grown on his skin, but he couldn’t rule it out. He couldn’t claim, certainly, that he had had… something… inserted into his head, but he remembered it, and couldn’t claim it didn’t happen. “And then, one day… Hojo wasn’t there, but all his aides rushed in, with scissors and saws, to quickly hack away our bonds and chains, and hook us all up to ether tanks, and then run away. I heard the screeching of car wheels as the aides all rushed away. In the labs, some tried to stand, seeing that they had been untied, but none of them could do it. I didn’t try to get up.

“A set of new boys, who hadn’t seen the bad lab yet, showed up. They drug open the heavy door, and saw us, and realized exactly what their own fate was. They started screaming. One man, who was trying to stumble upwards… when he heard their screams, even though his legs didn’t work, he used his arm muscles to launch himself at them, with some scrap of metal he found nearby, and he tried to shut them up…

“Well, we didn’t like noise.”

At this point, Cloud’s voice was dark, and deep, and it had been growing that way slowly. It was a tone Aeris’s hadn’t heard out of him before this, and one she wouldn’t hear often. It only came when she was eloquent, and that was rare. He was expression revulsion, old hate, true feelings which normally he would not even light upon in his head, but now had approached him quietly, as if from behind… it was lucidity, to a mind normally shrouded with mist, but it did not reveal a landscape particularly sweet.

“Eventually, ShinRa Officials burst into the lab. They were from a department who had been vying for power with Hojo’s and managed in a bit of good politics to get him shut down temporarily, hence his hasty exit. He found a way to pretend it wasn’t him, I think, after the fact. I didn’t hear much about the fallout. They ran into the building, guns out, shouting… they managed the wave of screaming, crying, untouched SPIRIT recruits rushing them, but once they came into our lab and saw us…. Ha ha ha. These were big time Turks, you know. And when they saw us, it was like they were smacked silent. Just the leader managed to stay upright, pale as a goddamn sheet, and his voice thin as paper, so it took them a good hour to follow his orders to get us all out of the cars and loaded into trucks to bring us to wherever could take us. It took them a week to get us all somewhere, anywhere that was capable of taking us. I mean, no place was totally capable. They just looked for places that would even take us in after seeing us. Which is why they had to set up a whole new clinic in the mountains, just for the SPIRITs.”

 “There were some hundred and fifty of us. Maybe. I don’t even know what number Hojo started with. I don’t want to know. Some dozen of us died once we were brought out of the lab and before we got to the clinic.

“And that’s it,” he said, weakly now, ending with a sigh. “After that, it was recovery in the clinic for a few years. None of us recovered. We knew we were there for life, because no one could heal us.

“No one short of an Ancient, that is.”

Cloud’s expression, as he looked up to Aeris, after hours of staring at the ground beneath him, was a mask of self-loathing, and doubt, and depression. But he was smiling. A smiling of spite, of course, but also, a smile of desperation, the dark side of devotion. It was a horrifying face, like a grimacing mask used in tragedy theatre, warped, but Aeris responded to it with a smile that lit her up like a fire in the hearth bursting into life when the flames hit the air. She grabbed his face, and pushed it towards hers, and kissed him on the forehead, with determined strength. “I’m going to prove your boys so wrong, they fall over in shock.”

“They’ll fall over cause they can’t stand.”

“Except they will,” said Aeris, “And what’s more, they will dance, because I have promised it.”

Aeris’s voice was caught by the wind, and flown away, as if carrying the prophecy away to the people. She clutched Cloud’s head, bulky in his plastic mask, close to her chest for a minute, then let him go. “It’s a long way until then, but it will be done.”

Cloud said nothing, and did not move to indicate his feeling about her response. She was silent in return, casting her glance up at the moon. It was almost completely overhead, and almost full, so its glistening rays covered the whole quiet land with bright light, illuminating every detail of the ancient rocks and whispering grasses. Cloud saw, out of the corners of his eyes, bugs flittering in the air, moonlight occasionally catching their thin wings—before they flared with their own, golden light, bright around him over the many miles of the plains, like a constellation on land. They moved in loose flocks, Orion and Draco sweeping over the land, chasing each other leisurely, as if dancing, unconcerned, disturbing the night with only quiet calls.

After a while, Cloud drew in a hesitant breath. “I didn’t want to be impertinent before, but now that I’ve told you everything I remember, I have to ask you something. The question is… important to me, though I can’t really explain how it is.”

“Well, I don’t really need to know why you need to ask it,” she said. “You’ve told me so much, how could I deny this?”

Cloud blinked and looked downward, avoiding her gaze. His face was softer, now, as it had been the day he met her. “I just need to know. Like. How close was Hojo to turning us into… what he wanted us to be? Could he have done it?”

Aeris tilted her head, and involved emotion crossed her features, anger and determination mixed. “Could he do it? Was he close? Those are two different things, in this case.

“He was close. More close than I would ever want him to be. He knew what he was doing far too well. His knowledge of the creation of the Fayth is uncanny and hints that he had some… informant. Yes, he was very close. He knew what a Fayth is made of, and he knew, I am almost convinced, exactly how they were made.

“But could he make one? No. Could he ever make one? Even with full knowledge of how a Fayth is truly made? No. It is completely beyond him.”

 “How?”

Aeris held out her hands. “Why lie to you? The creation of a Fayth is this: they, a living and sentient being, are first imbued with the air of a higher plane— ether works perfectly well for that. They then willingly give up their bodies—pain is not the recommended way to make that happen, but a man in great pain usually wishes to die. Which isn’t the same as giving up one’s body, but unfortunately, it works. Third, in the second where they decide to ascend, the Summoner who is creating a Fayth casts a spell on them.

“Hojo figured that Lightning could suffice, because he could not obtain nor cast the real spell. Should he even hold an ancient, refined, powerful Materia in his hands designed to cast that one spell, he could not cast it. This spell is called Holy.”

“Holy,” repeated Cloud. His skin prickled. “What is Holy?”

Aeris looked down for a minute, considering her answer. Then, with a smile, she extended her arms, so that the moonlight brightened them, and emphasized herself, as well as what was around her. “This, and what this does,” she said. “That’s the best definition I have. Holy would be classified as a spell of movement. Holy is like when happens when a person gets up to dance, or Holy is like what stirs a herd of beasts to run across the plains. Holy is a word, a blessing that speaks, and a blessing that moves. It’s a call. And even if Hojo had a Holy Materia, he could not cast it. I know Holy. It does not allow the base or the unkind to cast it. And there is no substitute for Holy. Hojo made Ether work for the air of the higher world, he made pain work where willing compliance was supposed to be, but nothing, no matter how bright, or powerful, or emphatic, stands in the place of Holy. Only Holy is the archspell, and only Holy can make a holy being. That is all,. His efforts, I promise you, are in vain.”

Cloud lowered his head to his chest, and covered his eyes with his hand. “Thank you for telling me this,” he eventually said, weakly, his voice mostly swallowed by his mask.

“You deserved it,” she said, trying to hide her joy and relief, seeing the fear and the horror drain out of him. “And I was happy to tell you.”

Cloud lay still for another few minutes, calming his breathing and trying to not focus on his growing headache. This was why he avoided excess emotion, honestly.

Aeris looked at him, hidden beneath himself, curled up in a contortionist’s pose with a weight of metal heaped on his back, statuesque in his self-control, as he willed his pain away from himself, overcome with memory, taxed with emotion, and enshrouded with shame and regret and fatigue. Her eyes glimmered with compassion, and she kept herself from holding him.

“Are you tired?” she asked softly, making sure not to alarm him.

Cloud chuckled in response.

She shook her head, while pulling her auburn hair out of its loose knot to relax it. “On a lovely night with an almost full moon, I can’t be tired myself. It doesn’t matter, though, you are physically exhausted and this is the best time to heal you. I’m going to ask you to sleep.”

“Are you my doctor then?”

“Better, I am your home,” she said, matter-of-factly, her eyes shining as the light of the moon hit them, playing with the glimmer of her inner humor.

“Well… yeah,” Cloud said. “I guess I shouldn’t get too used to slacking off on the Ancient’s commands.”

Aeris grinned. “Tonight, I should hopefully fix your shape, so that your sides are back to normal, and your frame isn’t as bent from years of carrying the tank as it is now.”

“Is it bent?” asked Cloud with some surprise.

“Yes,” said Aeris, a bit sadly. Cloud walked… she had seen no reason to bring it up, but he walked with more than just a little limp. “But no matter, this is something that’s easy for me to straighten out, I just didn’t want to mess with your spine when you still had a lot of walking to do. But since we’ll hitch a cart tomorrow, and then rest in Bevelle for a few days, there shouldn’t be any issue with you getting used to a more straightened shape.”

“Well, it’ll be nice to be done with the crick in my back,” Cloud muttered.

Aeris smiled. “Ready for sleep, then?”

“I’m always ready for sleep,” sighed Cloud. “Might I mention that it’s nice to be able to?”

“I imagine,” said Aeris softly, laying her hands on the ground, then lifting them slowly, as if pulling a thread out of a quilt.

“Oh,” said Cloud, “I didn’t mean to…”

“And you didn’t. Don’t worry about what I don’t worry about anyway,” she said, smiling, her form dark with the moonlight behind her. Her hands were up in the air now, poised like the wings of a bird about to beat. “Good night, Cloud.”

“Good night,” he said.

Aeris lowered her arms, and got to work.


	5. Chapter 5

 

Tifa rolled up her sleeves, and got to work.

Today was the day she, at long last, attacked the final room in the old laboratory. She wasn’t sure if she or Father would use these rooms back here for anything, she had only really set up the nice, more spacious front rooms for him to live in. But neither she nor he would feel right until the whole lab was cleaned, and all the evidence of the crimes committed there wiped away with vinegar and orange peel and determined cheerfulness.

“The main problems with these old labs,” she confided to herself, “Is that since the scientists were so hell-bent on privacy, there are no damn windows to light up the place.” Of course, on the Thunder Plains, windows didn’t so much light up rooms as air them out, but in this case, it really was the thought that counted. Having picked a wall (eastern-facing, so that the dim orange glow of the sun behind the clouds, like a halo, would occasionally grace the room) Tifa clenched her fist in its leather and brass glove, pulled her arm back over her shoulder, tensing her muscles, and gave the wall a good, solid punch.

She caused the lab to shake, but that was about all. However, a few hard kicks in the same place, wrought by her iron-toed boots, made a good starting dent.

The crashing disturbed her Father, who was napping somewhere away in the finished rooms. “Tifa?” called a voice, sour, rasping, a human voice, but as if spoken through a choked throat. “Is everything alright back there?”

“Perfect, Father!” she called. “I’m making a window back here in the lab to air things out!”

There was a loud rustling back where Father had his den. “Is that wise? You might disrupt a Mako line. And won’t rain get in?”

“It’s not going to rain for a good two or three days,” she shouted back, “I know the way the weather works on the Plains. It’ll just be foggy until then. We have enough spare glass that I’ll have it filled up by the end of the day, and the Mako tubes are almost entirely underground for this Lab. It’s the electricity lines that are in the walls, and I can replace those easily, should we ever need them back here.”

Her father growled in response. “Be careful.”

“Always am,” she called, before taking a blind kick at the wall in an attempt to crumble it. Some plaster rained down, but nothing impressive happened. Glowering, she decided to kick her efforts up a level, and searched around the room for a blunt object to strike at the wall with. “I have an iron bat somewhere…” she muttered, “It’s not like this place isn’t lacking in impressive weaponry… but impressively thin syringes don’t really demolish walls…”

Eventually, Tifa settled for tearing an old, rusted iron pipe off the wall.” Everything is still fine!” she called to her father when the pipe made a sound like a dragon screeching in pain after its tail had been stabbed.

Her father sighed in response.

Tifa rubbed some of the grey rust off of the pipe with the leather heel of her glove, which worked pretty well, but littered the floor with the vile-smelling stuff. After she had a good grip on the pipe, she took it to the wall. A few hits exposed the wall’s insulation, which she tore out quickly with her pocketknife. She eventually found a few wires, but once those were tucked out of the way (and okay, she snapped a few) it was simple, if strenuous, work to open the wall to the world outside.

The silence of the laboratory was instantly broken with the rush and roar of the Thunder Plains, which were never silent, and never still. The clouds boiled as if they were being poured out of a cooking-pot, and inside them there were nigh-constant flashes of thin, twisted lightning. The wind was tearing through the pale green grass, which bent and thrashed like seaweed, and the sound of sighing and shrieking filled up the air, which was blown by incredible winds.

Tifa smiled, and closed her eyes for a minute. “A good day,” she whispered, “Cold, clear, active… Well, father,” she shouted, “I guess we can call the lab good and aired out now, hm?”

“This is going to put out the kitchen fire,” he shouted back, irate. Tifa laughed and promised to look for some suitable glass to grind down to shape as soon as possible.

But before that, she had to get rid of anything in the room resembling a hazard, any needles left to fall behind cabinets or more rotting pipes like the one she set down on an old, coffee-stained and moldy desk. The room was large, there were plenty of places for biohazards to be hiding—that collection would probably take her until lunch. “Are the hazmat bags still by the scraps pile outside?” she asked her father.

She waited for him to shuffle around and get to a window. “Looks like it. How do you hold those things down in the wind?”

“Well,” she said, walking towards him through the maze of labs (all of which but this last one she had cleaned, though few of which were tidied up into something resembling a house instead of a bare office) “They’re a tough plastic with a mesh of iron wire inside holding them together and specifically designed to dispose of sharp, rusted metal and dangerous chemicals. I don’t think a little wind will bother them. Could you pick one up for me quick?”

Her father muttered to himself, but eventually pulled himself to the door, shoving it open and snaking the upper half of his body outside to reach the bags, picking one up in-between his front claws. “Is this lab as bad as the last one?” he asked.

“No,” said Tifa. “This one’s just a little dirty, from what I can tell. No hidden bodies, no puddles of acid, no piles of human waste, just a whole bunch of scraps and leftover equipment. Should be an easy clean, and then… this building may as well be a Bevelle apartment suite.”

She turned the corner into her Father’s room, which used to be an office and several small dormitories, but the two of them had torn down the walls to make one spacious, cave-like living room. The creation  of the giant hall was necessary, considering Tifa’s father,  who was now crouched near the front door, shaking water droplets off his head, was almost as big as a house himself, a beast like those that spawned out of Sin with gigantic wings and sharp, bone-like horns, his skin black as soot and his claws long and sharp.

In summary, an average bedroom wasn’t going to cut it. Nor was a nice, picket-fenced home in town square, hence the rehabilitation of what used to be a laboratory of questionable ethics a good twenty miles out of the nearest town. The hideous beast handed his daughter a waste-disposal bag, and she smiled and thanked him, returning to her work.

The beast crouched down, muttering as he tried to avoid hitting the walls with his wings, and careful to avoid the second-hand shelves and end tables full of nice vases and books and record-players that Tifa had pulled out of junk heaps and abandoned houses and then set up nicely in the redesigned lab. He listened to the clatter and crashes of Tifa gleefully tearing apart the old, rusted lab, as he attempted, once again, to find some way to read a book.

It took Tifa about three days to clear out the final chamber of the lab, including a setback when she uncovered a tube of black gunk so vile in scent and appearance that it took her and her father several hours to figure out how to safely dispose of it and WHERE to safely dispose of it (the makeshift landfill for all the other dangerous crap wasn’t going to cut it for this.) In the end, the old man suggest he fly it quickly to the only Lifestream crack in the Thunder Plains, some fifty miles from their laboratory, assuming in his faith that the Ancients could handle it. Tifa reluctantly let him, after making him promise to be very quick and stealthy about it, since there still wasn’t any rain that could shield him from curious on-lookers.

But after a fashion, the old lab, once littered with the evidence of atrocity and madness, was clear, sanitized, and ready to be made a home.

“Almost a shame we have to keep this nice, open place to ourselves,” said Tifa, as she and her father made a final examination of the corners and pipes of the laboratory, making sure that everything rotted or sharp was sufficiently hacked away.

“People will find it eventually,” her father growled, poking inside the depths of a large closet. “It’s amazing that ShinRa hasn’t decided to come by and burn down the evidence of its existence already. I begin to wonder exactly how this project was carried out, since their aftercare is not what I would expect.”

Tifa nodded. “I’m not sure I really like it either. Why would you leave something like this lying around for anyone to find it? Even if you don’t know how all the parts once fit together, the scraps alone are criminalizing.” 

“Just like leftover bones are always evidence that someone died, even if you don’t know how,” he growled.

“Blegh,” groaned Tifa, “Don’t remind me. I’m never going to forget how that goddamn torso looked at me.”

“It wasn’t looking at you, it was very dead,” he father said. As he rifled around an air duct, his claw made something skitter away into the metal shaft. “Tifa,” said he, “you missed something, up here.”

“I can’t reach up there, you oaf,” Tifa said, annoyed, standing on her tiptoes. “How on earth am I supposed to examine ducts on the ceiling?

“You could do like you usually do, and tear them off the wall,” he suggested idly.

“Har har,” said she.

It took him a bit of fishing around before he finally pulled out the object that had tried to roll away from him—it was a Materia on a thick silver chain, rusted and stained, clearly quite old. The Materia itself was—well, calling it black would be inaccurate. It was more like a colorlessness that happened to be very dark.

They both stared at it for a second. The father poked it with his claw. Tifa rubbed her eyes, and tried to focus on the little, chained-up hole, but her eyes kept sliding off of it. It seemed to… turn, inside itself.

“Huh,” said Tifa. “That’s not what you expect to find left in the air duct once you’ve already cleaned out all the corpses and shit.”

Her father continued turning it around, a puzzled look on his face.

“Do you know what it is?” she asked him, edging closer to the strange thing. “I mean, other than a Materia… is it a Materia?”

“It has to be, but…” he mumbled to himself. “Tifa, I’ve told you something of my history. Not everything, since it’s painful to dredge up… you know the horrors I have faced, the things done to me, in the name or progress… those who tortured me… and the dark arts and foul ingredients they have used. I have tasted ancient poisons, and watched spells made by races before humans boil in the air, with eldritch runes… I have been subject to the gross ingredients of malpractice.”

“Yes?” said Tifa, with hesitation, when he paused.

Her father looked at her, confusion evident on his toothy features. “I have no idea what this is.”

 

-

 

After spending a day and a half in Bevelle, in which Cloud spent most of the time locked in a hotel room (the crowds wore on him even worse and even more quickly than he expected) and Aeris spent most her time on various errands, they entered Machalania woods. Their several day walk through the woods was uneventful, Cloud occasionally mentioned something or other about Nibelheim, but he didn’t much like the subject, so little was said about it. Aeris would talk about whatever beasts the two passed by, and further explicated subjects of the Lifestream and the inner workings of the Planet, which were things Clouds had a lot of interest in, so she felt free to dwell on them, even when he admitted he didn’t understand her well anymore. Aeris sometimes, out of the corner of her eyes, caught Cloud smiling as he followed a bright-colored bird or bug or spray of delicate, translucent flowers with his bloodshot eyes, picking himself over decaying, fungus-filled logs with his gradually reduced limp. Once, a black bird with wings from which bright jewel tones shone behind its inky cloak landed on a branch of an emerald-leaved tree right before Cloud’s eyes, and he whistled at it, his cheerful tone distorted by his mask, thin, yet upbeat, unthinkingly happy.

They usually travelled in silence, occasionally helping each other over rivers or thick piles of fallen red leaves, interlaced with nearly silent pits of jeweled snakes. They slept in whatever dry, clean patch Aeris could find or make, and though beasts paced around their camp, curious, neither thought that they would ever harm the two of them with Aeris there. And they did not.

After some time, they emerged, suddenly, onto the Thunder Plains. Their last day in the forest had been rainy, and rumbles of thunder grew as the wide sea of leaves thinned, until there were only a few sparse, thin trees around them, nothing like the tall, thick, vine-draped kings of the forest. And finally, suddenly, the abyss of the Thunder Plains opened to them like a door blown agape.

The ground seemed to decrease in front of them, tilting down into some sort of gradual basin—or maybe that was only the effect of the vastness on their eyes. Above them, and slanting away, were the clouds, low, thick, dark, voluminous, curving like rivers and pouring down as if held in a heavy, over-stretched tarp. The clouds were never still—grey with black centers; they boiled, and heaved, like slave workers trying to raise the stones of a great palace aloft, and their sweat dripped down thin and quiet, pouring on fields of white, malnourished grass. The thunder growled ceaselessly in the angry heavens like a beating drum, first here, then far away, and sometimes erupting into roars, accompanied by gleaming, flashing white fangs. The land was featureless naturally, and only occasionally was decorated by uniformly crumbling buildings of grey stone which could have been mirages in the misty, rain-decked world.

The Thunder Plains, travelers often remarked, was oppressive in a way that nothing else natural had even been, except perhaps the deep trenches of the ocean (and the things it spawned.) The only comparison was deep depression—a state which, unlike the rest of the world, was entirely pale and dreary in palate, always and eternally loud with furious whispers and cries, and uncannily flat and continuous, as if there was, literally, no end to the storm. Most people refused to believe any evidence of natural cause in the making of the Thunder Plains, but instead, generally, claimed it was gigantic curse laid on Spira after they had slogged through it once.

Cloud’s mask was fogged with all the rain, so she could not see the smile grow on his face, but she could head his contented sigh. “I never thought I’d see it again,” he said dreamily, “and then they opened the door to the laboratory, and I heard the thunder again… and a gust of rain came in and fell on my face...” he closed his eyes.

“You never stop loving your home land,” said Aeris happily.

Cloud opened his eyes again. “Where’s yours?”

“Well, the Lifestream,” she said, “but you mean where I was born, some several millennia ago... it’s not the same for me, since I barely remember… several ten thousand years in one place sort of blurs your memory of times before. But I was born on this continent, actually. The land was a little differently shaped then, and obviously, everything looked different, but I was born somewhere where Macalania Forest is today.”

Cloud looked back over his shoulder at the receding trees. “Really?”

“Yes, but it was a pretty dismal swamp back then! My race had just arrived at this continent, and hadn’t done much cultivation yet, so they called me one of the first Wilderia Children,” she said happily, clutching her hands in front of her as she examined the storm stretched in front of her. “My, it never stops impressing you.”

Cloud hummed positively. They both listened to the thunder.

“You said that Nibelheim is along the east coast?” Aeris asked.

“Very close to the ocean,” Cloud confirmed. “You have to be careful not to run into the peninsula and get lost there, though.”

“Right,” said Aeris. “Well, I don’t think it should take us long to get there.”

“A few days, I would think.”

“Yes,” said Aeris, peering up at the clouds again. “Spira in her true glory. I promise you, the dance of the spirits, which you cannot see, doesn’t even compare to the sky itself.”

“I always thought it was amazing that the clouds were so many colors,” said Cloud. “Grey, of course, but orange, green, blue sometimes, all sorts of deep, chalky colors…”

Aeris giggled, and held her arm out to her companion. “Shall we?”

Cloud accepted. “Well, we can’t just stand here.”

“Glad you agree,” Aeris said. Arm in arm, they stepped out of their small canopy of Macalania’s last tree into the infinite storm.

A traveler from Bevelle, perhaps, would be devastated by the muck, gloom, and damp of travelling through the plains. To be sure, if you live there, true dryness is not a state you know. But Cloud was a native of the Plains, and had grown up in a village that knew no bathing or swimming because both were redundant, and knew no clothes-washing other than just going outside again. Aeris, beside him, was a native to the molten insides of the Planet itself, and wasn’t that concerned about getting a bit of muck on her. They both enjoyed the first wash of rain plastering their hair to their faces, and, after a few minutes, by silent agreement they removed their shoes to better feel the swampy ground under their feet.

“The roads really are a bit easier, we could walk on those,” Cloud offered.

“No,” said Aeris resolutely.

Cloud practically walked with a spring in his (still uneven) step for those next few days. Even the knowledge of what was about to occur couldn’t sink his spirits. Being in his native air—and his native water— was a fine cure for him.

Since Aeris decided that sleeping in the rain might be going just a bit far, she had Cloud direct them to reactors to spend the nights, since he knew that the chance of anyone actually being inside a reactor at any given time was incredibly small. She made a point of drying their clothes every evening, if just for the sake of comfortable sleeping on Cloud’s part, but since there was no such thing as cover when travelling the Thunder Plains, on or off road, nights were the only time they were warm or dry. They both got used to goose-flesh skin and white breath.

During the nights, Aeris worked diligently on Cloud. She was certain she was near a breaking point—his dependence on ether was growing thinner, and she was working on healing him bit by bit, so that his nerves, as a whole, were beginning to work normally—in some cases, nothing substitutes continual persistence.

But there was a bit of him that would still require skill—no matter how well she enticed his body into functioning, no matter how sweetly she encouraged his addicted blood to accept oxygen again, she did not change his slightly inhuman nature, which resisted change at any degree higher than her messing with individual nerves.

There was something still buried in his soul, his mind, and body, with tendrils everywhere, that refused to let him settle back into a state of humanity, and kept him between the physical world of Spira, and the sort of wide night of spirits. As she made the playing field of his body less jumbled, Aeris felt she was getting a better look at the contamination, which the human doctors, for all their training, had never seen—but she had a while until she could grasp its workings fully. Her priority at this time was to separate the disease from the ether that fueled it, anyway, and she was sure she was but a week from taking his mask off.

Their Bevelle food supplies barely lasted the trip, but not to worry, Cloud knew how to get food in and beneath the rainy desert if they had to. In fact, Cloud’s knowledge of the Thunder Plains rivaled Aeris’s—it was the most pleasant leg of their trip, as they walked contentedly under fierce skies on top of quiet plains, unhurried, and not disturbed by the rain or the flashes of light. To Cloud, the sound of a shattering sky was like an old record, one played in his childhood and never forgotten.

But when they grew close to Nibelheim (and, incidentally, the as rain almost stopped, though the rolling lightning above never ceased) Cloud grew slowly more nervous and despondent. They had already agreed ahead of time that Cloud would stay anonymously at the inn, and only call himself a recovering SPIRIT, but give no name, since the thought of revisiting old friends in the town was… less than pleasant to him.

 Aeris would do the socializing as caretaker, and since there was only one thing a former SPIRIT would want with Nibelheim, Aeris would reveal her desire to see the old laboratory up front. Cloud said the villagers were a courteous race, and they would allow her to do what she pleased, but to not expect a guide or much information, since they were also honorable, and he had heard reports of their mourning after they learned what had really happened in the scientist’s lab.

When they first came in sight of Nibelheim, highly peaked roofs peering through the mists on the horizon, Cloud stumbled. Aeris propped him up without a word, and they continued walking. The tops of the small houses grew clear, black rotting wood bars that shed many pale stone shingles, continually darkened by rivulets of rain that poured down the scales and through the black drain-pipes on every building to the streams that ran in the street. The streets were of the small pale cobblestone that formed the roofs of the houses, and they were similarly drenched, as small, white feet darted splashing across them, hitting the hems of wet, voluminous skirts. In this part of town, there were only low, small, villager’s houses, and there was no gate and no wall, like towns in the South might have—what would you defend yourself from in the Thunder Plains? Who would attack? Even Sin was seldom seen here. The ancient cobblestones simply grew out of the thin grass some half-mile out of town to mark the way in, with no other fanfare.

Cloud tried to stop himself from reacting, but unable to deal with the pressure, he wandered into town limping on Aeris’s arm, his hand clutched over the parts of his face not hidden by his mask, which he tried not to scratch. Aeris walked proudly, holding him as if he were a prized beau, beaming at those few people on the street that afternoon. The children who were running around, gleefully playing tag, their jackets hanging nearby from the rotting railing outside of a poor woman’s house, slowed down when Aeris walked up to them, staring in wonder.

Aeris gingerly avoided a fairy ring of black toadstools that grew between the stones of the street, casting her glance occasionally down the twisting road at the larger, more elegant, stone-built houses down in the town center. “Could any of you children direct me to the hotel? My companion and I would love a rest,” she said sweetly.

The children were stuck dumb. Cloud, ashamed, attempted to hide himself more completely behind Aeris. Aeris cocked her head, wondering at why the children wouldn’t reply to her. “Is something the matter?” she asked.

At that point, suspicious about the sound of her children and nieces not making any noise, a thin, middle-aged housewife cracked open the door of her house, shaking the dew-spotted violets beneath the foggy window-pains with the force it took to move the rusty hinges. She peered through the spotted, copper frames of her glasses at the strangers in the street—and then, covering her face with her hands, dropped her basket of leeks and root-vegetables with a scattered pattering on the floor.

“It can’t be,” said she in wonder.

Cloud flinched—and then he was puzzled. She did not look horrified, her tone was a tone of awe. She didn’t seem shocked or appalled by Cloud—in fact, she was looking—at Aeris.

“Oh,” whispered Cloud. “Of course. THAT should have occurred to me.”

“What?” Aeris whispered back at him. “Am I doing something wrong?”

The woman fell to her knees.

Cloud sort of groaned in embarrassment. Aeris said, “Oh.”

“You are an Ancient,” said the woman, awestruck.

“They’ll all recognize you,” muttered Cloud to himself, behind his hand. “Of course they’ll recognize you, this is where I was taught about the Ancients, of course, this is so stupid, how did I NOT think of this, of course this would happen…”

Aeris bit her lip, and reformulated her plan. She walked past the young girls, who parted way for her in a fashion unlike children, dragging Cloud behind her, and stepped onto the woman’s front porch, where she kneeled in the wet dust, squashing fungus beneath her feet. “Maiden, arise,” said Aeris, her hand outstretched, “I need help today, not worship.”

The woman, dazed, remained on her knees, and looked at Aeris’s hand, as if trying to understand.

“We can’t avoid it now,” whispered Cloud, unable to stop speaking, though his voice was only a hiss behind his mask, “They’ll all see you, they’ll all see me, they can’t avoid, and I’ll have to…”

Aeris squeezed his arm fondly. “My fellow-traveler has been with me over a fortnight now. He requires rest, and for that, I need to be guided to the hotel. After that, I have a mission to complete, which will only take a guide and some of your time.”

Finally, the trembling woman grasped Aeris’s tiny hand, and was pulled up by Aeris’s incredible strength, swaying unbalanced on her feet. “Will you help us to the town center?” asked Aeris gently.

“Yes,” she said weakly, and then, “Yes, immediately! We will pass by the town of the priestess… I will tell her… I…” she floundered. “Yes, anything you wish!”

“Thank—” Aeris began, and was interrupted by a tug on the back of her skirt. She turned around to see the girls who had been playing tag before staring up at her, enraptured. Wordlessly, the eldest reached up to hand Aeris something—a tiny, glittering, golden hoop—a bracelet which she had been wearing on her wrist just a moment before. After a bit of shoving, the rest of the girls also gave her a bracelet, whether gold or something cheaper, made for younger girl, but, since Aeris was much smaller than the people of Cloud’s time in general, they all fit neatly onto her thin wrist.

(Despite his developing panic attack, Cloud did manage to shoot Aeris something of an ‘I told you so’ look.)

Soon, Aeris was being shuffled away by a slightly wobbly housewife, who seemed to think she was dreaming, the muttering was anything to judge. Just as Cloud feared, she started banging on doors (gently, so not to fracture any old, swollen wood) shouting that an Ancient had returned to Nibelheim, guided by a SPIRIT.

“Well, that’s true,” Aeris speculated, “You were the one who told me where the town is.”

“I do not need this,” muttered Cloud, trying to keep a handle on his breathing, “This is terrible, everyone’s going to… and I… what if…”

Aeris took a moment to, curiously enough, lean close to Cloud, and very seriously knock her forehead against his. “No one will recognize you,” she whispered. “Once I realized that they were all going to know me, I started casting an illusion around you.”

“You… what?”

“I can hide things by making them look different. I should have done that to myself, but too late now. No one will recognize you.” Aeris turned her face back towards the front, down the road, where people were beginning to pour out of their doors, gaping, dressed in brown work clothes decorated with swirling scarlet clouds (as was their fashion) and lifted her head and smiled, walking evenly, tip by tip on the cobblestones, with Cloud beside her.

From that time on, Cloud was completely frozen, shuffled along where he was dragged, and didn’t allow a thought into his head, so he wasn’t exactly present for the proceeding events.

People gathered about them, men and women alike, some still absent-mindedly clutching their stitching or their hammers or their pens, all taking time to get close to Aeris, peer at her, offer her something, perhaps say something before falling in line behind her in the gathering procession, which, in its extremities, almost faded into the mist. Aeris was decorated with golden hoops on her wrist and neck, all of which she gracefully accepted, and various thin-stalked white flowers in her arms. A thin veil, spotted with stitched lace leaves, was laid on her head, which smelled of powder and vanilla, and someone else put a beaded shawl around her—something almost too rich for the people of the Thunder Plains. Eventually, there was not a single person inside—even the old and sick found a place to pace behind the living Ancient, and when they reached the small temple, made of stone, roofed with colored tile which sped the rain away, making it one of the oldest and strongest buildings in the town, the Priestess was waiting outside, clutching a bunch of bright-red flowers in her hands; flowers which only grew inside the warm, safe confines of the earth-floored temple.

“My Lady, The Ancient,” breathed the priestess.

“Loyal priestess,” greeted Aeris, beaming. “And people of Nibelheim,” she addressed, turning around half-way to make it clear that she meant everyone. “I did not mean to cause a stir. Do not feel obligated to pamper me, I do not need praise. I am on the old mission to find a way to rid Spira of Sin, and all the help I need for you is a house for myself and my companion for some few days before we travel again. My companion is a former SPIRIT,” she continued, making sure that she had her arm in front of Cloud, masking him, instead of showing him off. “He would prefer not to be bothered by anyone, I am sure you understand.” She squeezed Cloud’s arm, dropped her authoritative tone, and turned to the priestess, beaming. “Once my friend, who is tired, is situated, I shall join you here, outside, to talk, and to converse, as long as you all like.”

After that speech, the townspeople found a place for Cloud with remarkable speed. There was a house, in the central circle of town, which used to house one of Nibelheim’s oldest families before they died out. As a show of their wealth, Cloud remembered, they used to keep the house looking so clean it might as well have been dry—no mushrooms, no bugs, no wet spots—all smooth stone and painted tile that the rain slipped right off of and the lightning never found. It was, of course, a little more shaky now, since no one had been living in it for a while (well, there was the debacle with ShinRa, who almost bought it as a vacation mansion, before he realized that the Thunder Plains were hellish) and it had not yet been totally renovated into whatever they were trying to make it into, but the upper floors were still situated for an old couple, with old, dusty bedrooms and end tables with dried roses still rested on them, a writing desk with yellow and crinkled papers laid out, and a bathroom with the sort of crystal taps and thin faucets that were built one hundred years ago. The elders of Nibelheim led Cloud up the stairs to his room, none recognizing him, and none asking any questions except for what he wanted to eat. Cloud mumbled an order for fruits and grains, and then asked to be left alone.

They left him alone. The house was so silent, with the glass windows blocking out the omnipresent thunder, that Cloud could hear his own wheezing. It was dark, too, and though Cloud found the switch that was supposed to ignite the dusty chandeliers, they had all burned out long ago.

As he stood in the house, looking at the floors that threatened to collapse, examining the luxurious, showy spiral staircases, and the extra rooms with safes and bookshelves in them, full of goods that were not just excess put PERISHABLE excess—a ridiculous amount of finery for anyone in the Thunder Plains—Cloud remembered how, when he was a child, rumors had grown about the “Nibelheim Mansion” being haunted. He remembered being dared to dart in here once without being seen, and being unable to do it. Looking around now, he wished he had seen it in fuller glory. The house was still graceful, and still grand, and still sparkled in it gilded corners, even without the aid of the sun, and it was still crowded with antique furniture and ancient, foreign oddities; and he could only imagine what it had all been once.

He stumbled back over to the window and opened it to let in some of the noise from outside. Walking around like this was rarely painful anymore, though he didn’t want to risk breathing stuffy indoor air and agitating himself. When he finally figured out, with his feeble fingers, how to unclasp the rusty hinges of the almost off-white window and open it up to the town below, a gust of cold, wet, sighing Thunder Plains air floated into the room, gracefully unsettling everything.

Cloud looked down from the second-story height to the stone street below, where Aeris has purposefully placed herself on the ground—on her own holy throne, in a way—surrounded by rings of people who were literally stretching to be near her, some covertly trying to touch her.

Aeris was right in assuming that Cloud wanted no place in the discussion—he shuddered just looking at the crowd. But he kept watching anyway, for the unique sight in its center—Aeris, piled over with curious children, who kept bringing her flowers and trinkets (which she started putting in her hair, studding it like pearls in fine fabric), entirely unconcerned about being manhandled, graciously smiling at each. He watched her, several times, lightly grasp a child who came near to her—and whisper something. He never knew what she told them. But he saw that each one of then smiled.

They kept her there for hours (Cloud left off idly watching on and decided to explore the mansion for a spell, though really, all he found were empty rooms—so much for the rumors of a secret crypt) until it grew late enough for dinner, and then, they moved her into a hall where great amounts of food had surely been prepared. Cloud knew, because he had to reluctantly shut the windows to block out the nauseating smell.

Well, it made him nauseous. They brought him his bowls of peaches, grapes, and wild rice soon after their own feast began, and he accepted them with mumbled thanks, but, of course, didn’t eat much.

All he found of any use in the house, curiously, was a few Materia that looked like summons. Why they were left there, he couldn’t say, but they were powerful, so he held onto them. They might come in handy, he reasoned, especially for a man who couldn’t lift a sword to save his life.

He picked up a book or two off the shelves—both frail and crumbling by now—and brought them to his bed. They were both scientific volumes, a subject which, reluctantly, he had become interested in over the years. They were mostly about the science of energy, and the sources it came from—he smiled as he imagined Aeris’s impassioned notations about the tapping of the Lifestream. It was a good supplement to Aeris’s overblown, yet vague descriptions of the same topic—she knew too much to make anything evident to Cloud, really. The author of this book—Gast by name—wrote a dry but thorough examination of the properties of Lifestream and Materia as sources of energy, and how they were used in such things as Al Bhed technology (descriptions of which were couched in Fayth-praise and hate of the Al Bhed, of course.)

Aeris announced her presence with humming, long after dark, as she alighted the stairs. It took her a few minutes to wander the mansion before reaching Cloud, and as she did so, her humming slowed and stopped.

Eventually, she called out cheerfully—yet at once warily—to Cloud, who answered in much the same tone. She entered his room, smiling, and unloaded a literal pile of gifts and treasures on the ground about the size of a bushel of wheat.

Cloud was silent for a second. “We have never been able to grow that amount of flowers in the Thunder Plains.”

“And I think some of my golden treasures I was presented with were actually ripped off the walls when I arrived,” she said, perplexed. “I appreciate the thought, but I don’t know why you feel the need to shower an immaterial spirit with… stuff.”

“It’s a tradition,” said Cloud, “it shows devotion. It’s supposed to be a way to say that you, The Ancients, the Planet, matter more than anything.” He spoke hesitantly, because he noticed that Aeris was glancing almost—uneasily around the room, up at the rafters, and down through the floor, which she struck once with her foot. “Is something the matter?”

“Yes,” she said, quizzically. “How old is this house?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s older than you, I promise, and much older than that, though I couldn’t give you an exact date… I know, because it’s alive.”

Cloud raised his eyebrows, and gave Aeris a look which said ‘please tell me you are using a non-literal and quirky Ancient figure of speech again.’

“Very old houses become somewhat aware of themselves…” Aeris muttered, walking around and poking at the walls, “Not their fault, they’re bombarded with emotions of people who consider them family… they’re one of the few objects that are given so much importance that they must carry it somehow. But… no, I’m not sure it’s the house. Oh, this is uncomfortable.”

“What is it?” Cloud whispered, watching Aeris’s growing agitation and not much liking it.

“Is there a practice of building cellars in the Thunder Plains?”

“Of course. Barns didn’t really cut it.”

“Big ones?”

“Uh… depending on the size of the house.”

“So this house would have a large cellar.”

“Yes…” said Cloud very hesitantly. “Actually…”

“Actually?”

“I was just thinking about it earlier… There were rumors, when I was a child, of something… large, and unpleasant, being under this house. Just because it was old. And old people lived here. Child’s stories.”

“Well, rumors do not build around old houses for no reason. They’ve all been growing a lot to talk about… let’s not go looking for this cellar, is that all right?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” said Cloud, quietly.

Aeris looked around for another minute, frowning, as if looking for something. Her sharp eyes peered at the boards holing up the wall, at the floor below her, past the walls into things that Cloud could not see, with vision more acute than a cat’s. She closed her eyes, and then waited for a minute. Then, she opened them, and shrugged. “Well, it’s no real problem, just like all old houses. Anyway, isn’t it a lovely place to stay? There is wealth like this in Bevelle, and style like this, but not luxury like this, and not fashion like this. This is hand-woven lace, it must be,” she said, happily examining the bedroom curtains.

“It is, I remember them being so proud of it, all those years ago…” said Cloud softly, reminiscing. “We were all kids then… me, Tifa, Biggs, Wedge, Jessie…”

Aeris smiled, her fingers still on the tiny holes of the white drapes. “You had a lot of friends as a child?”

“We were all friends, there were only half a dozen children of age,” he said. “We all wanted to live in the big Nibelheim Mansion, because it was so clean, and so beautiful… Tifa made me swear we would live here when we were married.”

Aeris smiled. “Tifa was a little girl?”

Cloud ducked his head. “My next door neighbor. She liked me, I guess.”

“Hmm,” said Aeris, absentmindedly looking outside. “Maybe you’ll run into her again.”

Cloud was silent for a second. “I’d rather not.”

Aeris nodded. “All the same.” She stretched her arms above her head, pulling her muscles a bit. “I’m sore from sitting down so much… I forgot how taxing a body is! If only I could sleep it off,” she sighed.

“If only you could magically erase all your pain,” said Cloud sarcastically. Aeris laughed. “Why don’t you sleep, though?”

Aeris shrugged. “Too enjoyable. I love dreams. And since I don’t sleep like a human, I’d be in danger of not waking up for a very long time.”

“Oh.”

“Not timely,” she summarized. “And I plan to visit that lab tomorrow.”

Cloud stared down at the bedspread.

“I’ll tell you if I come to any conclusions about how to heal you,” said Aeris gently. “But for now, it’s pretty late, and you should get to bed. I feel like I’m close to getting that mask off you, so I can’t wait to get to work.”

Cloud started. “Really? You think so?”

“Haven’t you noticed how little Ether you’ve been breathing?” asked Aeris, gesturing to his tank. “It shouldn’t take me much more than a few days now, if everything goes well. I’ve convinced your blood to listen to me—never say that persistence isn’t a virtue!”

Cloud covered his smile with his hand. “Thank you.”

“And you are welcome,” she said brightly. “But shh, shh, talking gets us nowhere,” she demanded, waving her hands to indicate that Cloud should lie down.

He complied. “You’re pretty excited for this, huh?”

“You’re fun,” said Aeris. “By that I mean, you’re a fun puzzle. It’s interesting to work you out. And it makes me hopeful for confronting Sin. Of course I’m excited, this could be the end of thousands of years of questing! It’s the most important work I’ve done in centuries.”

Ponderous, Cloud rested himself against the overstuffed down pillow. “Well, far be it from me to get in the way of important work,” he said, closing his eyes.


	6. Chapter 6

 

 Aeris finally moved again when the Thunder Plains sun, orange and huge and dull, appeared blurry over the horizon. Thinking about it, though, she wasn’t sure one could say that the Thunder Plains did have a horizon. It was more like a misty, cloudy wall far away that rounded off the world, instead of a line suggesting far-away places. There were no borders here—only dim layers of rain and mist, punctuated by sudden, sharp light, with everything indistinct below. To live in the Thunder Plains was to live on an island in the air, surrounded above and beside by white water, always unsure what was behind the next creeping wave.

Aeris had made it clear that she intended to leave alone and unimpeded this morning.  She refused to take a guide, and that was fine, because no one wanted to be a guide. The townspeople had made it plain that they considered it a grave and they refuse to disturb it. Someone tried to warn her about ghosts, but she only had to look at them to remind them who they were talking to.

Their worship was overdone. She enjoyed teaching them, and she enjoyed their love, but not necessarily their reverence. To Aeris, Aeris was part of the planet, lovely and holy, but lovely and holy dirt and rocks. She was the spirit of the deep, not the spirit of the tall pedestal.

Cloud slumbered for longer than he usually did. Even after guiding his nightmares away, Aeris usually saw him waking long before he had a full night of sleep, but now, perhaps because of the misty air of the Thunder Plains cool and sighing all around him, he slept peacefully after the dawn. Aeris sat beside him, and considered those things which she was becoming more and more certain of. She had most of the parts of Hojo’s plot in her head by now, but she was still uncertain what they made when put together. No matter what, it wasn’t a pretty picture. She didn’t have any hopes for pleasant revelations, her mind was focused totally on the possibility of finding parallel’s to Sin’s biology. And since she set out of unpleasant facts, every gross twist of Hojo’s design was heartening.

She had been, literally, in the belly of the whale before—she had felt exactly what Sin was, but it was like looking at a great pile of rotted, half-liquid garbage and being told to sort it into all its individual parts and restore it to ripeness. The concept was fine, but she didn’t have the trick to do it. The battle against Jenova and her Son had, for the Ancients, been something of a battle of technology—she attacked with bioweapons they had never seen before, corrupting Spira, and they found a way to make the antibodies as soon as they could, eventually learning enough about her to be able to attack rather than defend. But learning how to dissolve her spores had taken centuries of experimenting with them, so toxic they were—and by that time, her Son was already causing more damage than she ever had. And between their combined efforts in corruption, and the humans’ efforts in storing Lifestream away from its source… there was a reason they had resorted to walking avatars and the creation of the spirits of the highest air.

Their Fayth were not sleeping warriors. They aided the humans, and kept them from the majority of Sin’s direct harm. But they were an effort in cleaning up the blood from a gushing wound. At some point, the wound would just have to be healed.

She decided to leave Cloud to wake alone. She had a fair bit to do today, anyway. She left the mansion silently, casting another warning glare on the entrance to the cellar, hidden under a carpet, just for good measure. She wasn’t sure exactly how sentient the feeling down there was, but it wasn’t nice. At least Cloud knew better than to bother things like that. But how did a town so very spiritual miss something this unsettling?

She opened the door, and was treated to those people who happened to be in the street stopping dead in their tracks. She smiled, shut the door behind herself, and curtsied. They made frantic bows in return, and she excused herself silently but walking off the porch of the mansion and into the street, savoring the gust of dry, warm wind that filled the plains that day, bringing excited sensations from the storms above. The way to the reactor and the laboratory had already been pointed out to her, so she went on her way.

Normally, eighteen miles to and eighteen miles back would have been too much to ask of anyone, in consideration of both time and energy, but Aeris figured she was allowed to take a short cut. She waited until she was outside of the town, whose gabled roofs and lightning rod spires were swallowed into white clouds behind her, before she sighed, and melted.

All it took was to make a tiny crack in the earth before she scurried into it, a mouse through a hole, or a fish into the current. Going into the Lifestream was much easier than leaving it, but on land as charged with fire and soaked with rain as the Thunder Plains, she wasn’t worried about getting magic to work. She ran through the earth in a way similar to the way an electrical signal races through neurons in a body, inciting reaction across feet of flesh. She ran straight for the nearest lightning rod, figuring it to be the correct location, and waited just a few seconds for a bolt of lightning to excite the air around and create energy for her to cut through the surface, erupting like a geyser from packed, wet earth, baking a clay body around her with the heat of the scorched air as she came.

She emerged covered in clay and mud. “This is why I prefer water incarnations,’ she muttered to herself, scraping away as much of it as she could, repelling it with a silent chemical reaction.

Then she peered around the landscape—mostly flat, of course, and mostly layers of grey, with some bright yellow and orange shadows peeping in behind. Not far away at all, to her left, was a large, metal-walled complex with some piles of trash outside it, and next to no windows. Aeris figured this must be the laboratory she was looking for—and indeed, she felt some sort of toxic aura coming from inside the building somewhere.

But she also felt, and heard, some people wandering inside. “Hm,” she whispered. “That’s not right. Perhaps ShinRa actually remembered it has mistakes to clean up?”

She tread carefully, on the tips of her toes, to the front of the laboratory, examining the piles of trash as she went by. They were bound up in hazardous material bags, ready to be carried away, and there weren’t many of them. Peering inside, she found old equipment, rusty metal, stacks of papers… but not a lot of chemical or biological material. Some, but that was mostly old and polluted reserves of blood, and blood so curdled that it could never be put back into living veins. The laboratory has clearly been through some spring cleaning, she thought dourly. That might make her job more difficult.

She looked, quickly, into a dim window near the front of the lab, and saw, to her surprise, something that looked like a cozy living room. There were a few layered quilts used as rugs, and pictures on the wall over shelves filled with second-hand books and kitsch… and somewhere, she could hear two voices. One was a young woman, with a Thunder Plains accent, and one an older man with a very low voice, who sounded like he was perhaps a Ronso, since he wasn’t speaking with a human mouth or voice box. He growled, and formed low vowels and hisses that humans usually didn’t produce, and failed besides at some of the delicacies of human speech. When she came to no immediate conclusion about who, logically, the two of them would be, she decided to find out the old fashioned way. She planted her feet firmly before their front door and rapped on it twice with her knuckles.

The voices fell silent. After a few seconds, they whispered to each other with frantic hushes. Aeris heard the scrape of metal. It didn’t take them too long, she felt, to appear just before the door, but they lingered there for a while, waiting.

Eventually, the knob turned, slowly, and the door was opened half-way. A woman, in her twenties, black-haired and brown-eyed, hid the rest of the laboratory with her body, hips holding the door open, one hand on the doorframe, and one hand, iron-knuckled, held in front of her. “Yes?” she asked.

“Hello! I am Aeris, I am a healer, and I would like to examine this laboratory for the sake of my studies.”

Tifa raised her eyebrows. She said nothing for several seconds, and Aeris smiled genially. “Normally, I would believe you’re really from ShinRa, but you…” she looked at Aeris’s shabby, soaked dress, the mud running in streaks on her legs, and the blades of grass tangled in her unbound hair and stuck to her cheek. “You can’t possibly be.”

“That’s funny, I would have assumed you were from ShinRa. Who else would be here?”

“Exactly,” said Tifa, a bit dryly. “A healer? If you’re looking to study medicine, you want any other laboratory. We mostly found dead people here, not healed ones.”

“I’ve travelled here with a SPIRIT, though he couldn’t approach the laboratory,” Aeris clarified. “He’s the one who needs healing.”

“A SPIRIT travelled? Like, with moving involved?”

“I dare say I am a decent healer.”

“You must be,” Tifa muttered, though she clearly still regarded Aeris with suspicion. “Why do you need to come here for your healing?”

“Certain substances were used on my patient when he was in this laboratory. I must examine them so that I know what to do to counter-act what they’ve done to him.”

“She’s doing her research,” muttered a low voice. Tifa twitched, and resisted looking over her shoulder to shush her father. Unbeknownst to her, Aeris had already managed to see him, since there was no precaution Tifa could take to prevent that.

“Well, I can’t help you, then,” said Tifa, “This laboratory has already been officially cleaned out, and so you won’t find anything that will help you, so you—”

“Wait,” said the low voice, more loudly this time. “Let me see this woman.”

Aeris pretended to peer into the dark. Tifa covered her face for a second, and said, “Oh, fine. You were the one that wanted all the secrecy and shelter, but fine.” She threw open the heavy front door (Aeris silently reconsidered the woman’s impressive muscles, which hadn’t been obvious at first) and let the thin light of the cloud-covered plains trickle into the wide chamber.

The beast inside, just barely crouching under the ceiling, slithered forth some feet to gaze at Aeris. She folded her hands, and stood primly still, letting him examine her. “Is something the matter?” she asked sweetly.

“Amiss… not a matter, I don’t think…” he mumbled. His breath was warm, like a dragon’s, but he wasn’t a dragon, Aeris knew. She knew what he was… and yet… what could he be doing here, away from any statues or temples? Perhaps the woman, though she did not have the air of a summoner, had made some sort of pact with him.

“I don’t recognize you,” said Aeris, “so you must not be one of the original ones. In fact, I don’t feel that we’ve felt you before at all, none of us, so you must be very new. Are you all right? Or perhaps are you trying to build a new temple on the plains?” She folded her hands in front of her face. “Would you like the temple blessed? I love giving blessings. It’s my favorite thing other than growing new flowers.”

“Father, what’s going on?” asked Tifa.

He moved a law in front of Tifa, but kept his eyes peeled on Aeris. “We may have an unusual guest.”

Aeris grinned, moved her hand into a prayer pose, and bowed. “I am Aeris, Ancient and Living, one with the Planet. You are one of the Spirits of the Highest Air, but not one I made. And you, Tifa, are a kind young woman. I hope that’s sorted out?”

Tifa did a rapid double take at Aeris, and then turned back to her father. “I know,” she said, and halted. “Those words.”

“The introduction of the Ancient to the People of the Plains in the first story of the Cycle,  
 said the father. “I thought Ancients didn’t read.”

“No, we listen. There’s still a great debate about whether or not we can allow the printing of books on paper, but we were a culture in love with oral tales.”

“You must be joking,” said Tifa. But the more she looked at Aeris, despite her shock, the more sure she was. Her face was almost the twin of the many painted faces on the walls of the Temple, framed with gold, always accompanied with candles and strings of shells hung on nails. She spoke like an ancient, her father knew instantly that she was not human… “Oh, you’re not joking.”

Aeris lifted up one hand. “You don’t have to fall to your knees. It’s okay.”

“Yeah,” said Tifa absently, looking down. “The floor’s kind of harsh, and I’m banged up from cleaning already, I wouldn’t want to try.”

“Lovely! You see, I’ve been treated to such a welcome in Nibelheim, it’s starting to disorient me. The Lifestream is very much about equality, you realize.” She perched her fingers together, and leaned up on her toes to get a good look at Tifa’s father, squinting her eyes. “Now, you must indulge my curiosity. I don’t think you’re a Final Aeon made for the battle against Sin, and I know you weren’t one of the originals. You’re new, but I can tell that you were never blood related to Tifa here. Sorry for prying, but I literally cannot help it. To me, you don’t… I don’t feel the fingerprints of the Lifestream anywhere on your make, though you are a Fayth, and I would have known, somehow or another , if you were made by us… the more that I think about it…” she bobbed onto her heels to lean back. “In light of recent events, your existence, especially in this laboratory, bothers me. Sir, may I ask about your transformation?”

The beast nodded his head. “I have saved the information from everyone else, since I don’t want anyone to know what has happened to me is possible. But to you, good spirit of the deep, I will tell everything. I am not Tifa’s blood father, we are adopted to each other. My name was once Vincent Valentine, and my maker was named Lucretia Crescent.”

 

-

 

Cloud took a walk that afternoon. It was short, and no one bothered him but to ask if he needed anything. He said no, and continued walking, somewhat unevenly, through the streets of Nibelheim. He examined the fronts of most of the buildings and then walked the town’s perimeter, admiring the view into the gentle, wide hills which sparked with far-away lightning and were foggy with rain. He took a small detour down a stone path to visit an old river he remembered, which still ran furiously, a torrent of constant rainwater darting over sharp stones, and promised death by swift currents to anyone who stepped in it. The children of Nibelheim were fond of watching the water, and sometimes dipping their toes in, since it was believed to be healing.

Cloud was still impressed with its force, but not with its promise of healing.

Eventually, he ended up back at the ShinRa mansion, though he decided, panting, to rest on the porch instead of returning inside. He watched the slow drizzle of the rain, and thought. His thoughts weren’t dark, but they were deep, and they involved him in himself, so his eyes were somewhat glazed over, unaware of villagers walking by. Some flinched away from him, some only glanced curiously.

He was there for a good hour before he knew he had to exercise his legs again unless he wanted to be stuck there with sleeping muscles and stiff joints. He had only just stood up, rubbing one of his calves, when he saw, off in the distance, a very bright, bouncy, distinctly Aeris-like blur running towards him, waving. He stood up all the way and waved back, and when the villagers around him saw what he was doing, they promptly overreacted.

Aeris graciously lifted up everyone kneeling with a curtsy, saying something to a few of them, before bounding up to Cloud. “Change of plans. You must come to the laboratory, because you will not believe what you will see there.”

Cloud was silent for a minute. “A giant, smoking crater?” he asked, sounding hopeful.

“Better,” enthused Aeris. “A comfortable country house built for two, with a delicious piece or two of our puzzle dropped right into our laps.”

“What?”

Aeris already had hold of Cloud’s wrist. In fact, she was so incredibly excited, that she quickly had hold of Cloud by his waist, and then his back and his thighs, and with due swiftness she carried him bridal style out of Nibelheim, back-tank and all. Cloud would have protest, but he found he had absolutely nothing to say.

As Aeris ran over the Plains, leaping perhaps a meter with every step (“I would travel with you in the way I usually travel,” she noted,” but I think zipping through the Lifestream would actually screw up the healing I’ve been doing at this point, especially since the Lifestream may just recognize you as a small tumor before I can get any messages across”), she descried the basics of what she had found to him. “The laboratory, after Hojo and his gang of hooligans were booted out by a slightly less evil branch of ShinRa Co, was silently claimed by a young woman and her adopted father as a home. The father has been experimented on by another scientist in connection with Hojo but also in a rivalry with Hojo, you’ll have to hear the whole thing from him. The father and daughter have completely cleared out the entire lab, cleaned it up, sanitized it, brought in shelves and books and lace curtains, you won’t believe it, it looks like an oddly built winter cabin.”

“You’re joking,” said Cloud. “It’s impossible.”

“They are very determined people. After the experiments the father has been through, they needed to live alone, away from people. He has been successfully, though with a few caveats, turned into a Fayth. A Fayth that, through error, is stuck in a bound-up Aeon form. I’m not sure how yet, he told me he wouldn’t tell the whole story twice.”

“Just what Hojo wanted,” said Cloud, “Though it wasn’t Hojo who did it.”

“Since we know already it is impossible for him,” Aeris agreed, skipping over rocks and patches of weeds as she did so. “His incredible state, like yours, bears similarities to the physiology of Sin, so he is also giving me important information. The downside is that the young woman seems to have cleared out almost everything I wanted to look at, including all of the ether, which she just sort of opened, not realizing anything was in the tanks. Still, I think the trade-off is more than worthwhile.”

“A human that made an Aeon,” said Cloud. “Even if it is a faulty one.”

“I told you that it was possible, of course,” said Aeris, “they just had to be a person that could find a willing patient, have a good grasp on magic, be able to kill someone, and be able to cast Holy at once. It’s getting someone who can do both of the last two at once that makes it such a rare skill for humans and such an easy feat for Ancients, since we’re all about death and rebirth.”

Cloud nodded. “Yeah, when you say it that way… I see why it would escape the ability of so many. This must be an incredible woman.”

“Have been, I’m sorry.”

“Have been. Must have been incredible. Was this the only one she made?”

“I’m almost totally sure of it, after hearing the story. There is one important detail that I  must warn you about before we arrive, though,” said Aeris in a rush, since the ability to run at a little over thirty miles per hour picked up their traveling pace a little.

“What’s that?”

“I must warn you as to the identity of the man and his adopted daughter.”

“Fire away.”

“I doubt you know the man, his name is Vincent Valentine.” Cloud shook his head. “But his adopted daughter goes by the name of Tifa Lockhart.”

“Oh,” said Cloud. And then he thought, and he said, “of course.”

He couldn’t say why this made sense to him, since he only remembered the girl from days of childhood friendship that, to him, were an immeasurable rift of time and space away. But he remembered her image, like a small impression of some light and weight on the spatial fabric of his mind, and her impression fit in the hole of ‘adopted daughter to lonely science experiment’.

“And I’ll take the glamour off you o that she can recognize you,” said Aeris, “since I promised that there would be no tricks or lies in conversation.”

“That’s fine,” said Cloud.

“You sure?”

“Yes. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ve already told them about my plan to heal you and use the data I glean from that to work against Sin, so they already know a lot of things you—”

“I’ll be fine.”

Aeris was quiet after that to let him think for the rest of the run, though, honestly, despite all the important thoughts he could be having, he was mostly concerned with the strangeness of being carried like a cocooned baby by a woman darting across the Thunder Plains at the speed of a wildcat with the pounding of her feet sounding like an amplified drum beat. They were running faster than the wind was tossing the clouds that day, so Cloud could see them pass by, mixing among themselves, little darts of lightning muttering inside. Eventually, the laboratory surfaced in front of them, its metal hull climbing swiftly over the horizon.

Cloud felt unafraid. He had come to trust Aeris, and besides, he probably wasn’t capable of feeling the enormous emotions he should be feeling.

Aeris set him down just outside of the lab after tripping down to a manageable speed. “Are you alright?” she asked. “I didn’t dare do that before now, since I was sure you would hyperventilate or that the surge of my energy would short cut your heart or something, but…”

“I feel fine,” said Cloud, straightening out. “A bit winded, dizzy, maybe a bit nauseous, but I’m not going to die.”

Aeris shook her head. “I keep underestimating you. You just have such tiny, fragile nerves and blood vessels and stuff and you don’t have a magical underground home to go to if your body stops working.”

“I’ll look into fixing that,” Cloud promised in deadpan. Aeris was still giggling as she knocked on the door, announcing herself to Tifa and Vincent. “Will you want to look inside?” she asked.

“I’ll look.”

Tifa opened the door, smiling at Aeris and peering curiously at Cloud. Cloud braced himself for a big reaction, first for overdone enthusiasm, and then, after Tifa didn’t react for a beat, for something more like pity. Neither happened, though. Tifa saw Cloud, and saw who he was and what he was, but didn’t react strongly to him either way. She just looked him over, thinking, almost unfazed by the juxtaposition of ‘girlhood crush’ and ‘horror’. It took Cloud a second to realize that Tifa really didn’t look as bubbly and animated as she did at the age of fourteen. He had to stare back at her, though he hated looking hard at other people, to get it into his head that Tifa Lockhart was an adult, and she seemed to be a balanced one, considering her reaction to seeing Cloud again, one hand on her front door.

She finally smiled. “Cloud. It’s really wonderful to see you again. I missed you when you left.”

Cloud ducked his head nervously. “Sorry for spending so long away.”

Tifa waved her hand. “Eh, you were a soldier, I didn’t think you could take cozy beach vacations all day. I mean, that’s clearly not what you’ve been spending your time doing.”

“Unless beaches come with scalpels and IVs now,” said Cloud, forgetting that this was something of an extreme statement until he said it. It was just his life, after all.

Tifa just shook her head. “Come in, both of you,” she said, turning her back to them to give them space to walk into the old lab. Aeris bounced right in, gravitating towards the thin amber beams of stormy light that poured into the room from lace-curtained windows. Cloud warily looked at the gigantic, dragon-like beast crouched in the corner, who seemed to regard Cloud in return with intelligent indifference.

Walking into the lab was remarkably unexciting. He recognized the view outside as the same view he had known in those years, the same tiny square glimpses of a rolling hill outside with a few bundles of wild yellow flowers on the shaded side… but the whole room looked so incredibly not like the laboratory that he couldn’t react to it like it was. His vision was sharp and clear, waiting for a bad reminder, an attack, a monster, anything, but the sense of never having been in this pleasant place before was too strong to overcome.

This was a family living room stretched to the dimensions of a cave, with a lofty, beamed ceiling from which two shabby fans hung, their lamps unlit. Bookshelves tried to fill the walls and corners of the room, each stacked with whatever junk Tifa had picked up from trash cans and street side piles, but the room just could not be filled. It was too large for little bits of luxury to contain its vastness neatly. There was no reason to try to artificially make it homey with couches and little kitchen spaces, since Vincent could never use them, so it ended up looking like a storage room that had been wallpapered with the images of a country home. But it couldn’t be called uncomfortable, it was cluttered and a bit dirty, there were haphazardly placed lamps and rugs and tables, but it couldn’t be called uncomfortable. It was awkward, but heart-felt.

Without saying anything, Cloud walked resolutely past this room to where he knew the next one lay. The laboratory in which he had been tested was sparsely furnished with a bunk bed, a table, and kitchen equipment, with a dresser full so full of old, second-hand clothes it was spilling over. One a cluttered, stained end table, there even stood a little radio and a CD player. After staring dumbly at the warm, nicely painted, lived-in room, full of junk and unwashed clothes and even a little basket of violets growing on the windowsill, Cloud finally realized that this room was now Tifa Lockhart’s bed room.

It was clean. There were no stains he could see, not on the walls, not on the floor, or the salvaged rugs on the floor. It smelled like a living human, without a trace of rot or refuse. The windows, which hadn’t been there before, were open, and a nice, wet breeze seeped into the room, tossing the petals of the violets and turning the bed sheets and curtains spotted and dark with warm rain.

Cloud felt Aeris and Tifa behind him watching, but he ignored them. He ducked into a few of the small rooms where Hojo would keep new experiments silently sequestered, and saw that they were either empty (and clean) or being used as storage rooms for things Tifa had found and thought she just might have a use for. As he wandered back  into the laboratory, into rooms he had never seen but sometimes heard, he saw that all of them, every corner, was clean, tidy, sanitized, and for the most part, bare and unused. Most of them looked like they had never seen human beings since the day they were built. At the very end, a new window, not framed yet with a clean wooden still, was opened to the breeze, with bits of drywall and plaster piled around it, bringing it home to Cloud that Tifa Lockhart had, herself, with only her hands and her heart, cleaned and purified every single room of the laboratory, which had been gathering blood and screams for many years, and her efforts were almost at a peaceful end.

“I don’t know why I was allowed to meet so many good people,” Cloud whispered to himself. He stared out the window for perhaps a full minute, watching the familiar skies of the Thunder Plains above. They were, to him, like the swells of the ocean were to a fisherman. They were unchartable, but he knew them, and he pulled his daily bread, so to speak, out of their billows. “I don’t know how people can be so good.”

“We like to shove them back into incarnation as fast as possible, since they’re more or less invaluable to life, so there tends to be as much of a concentration of goodness on Spira as possible,” said Aeris. “You can clearly see said value of one good person before you.”

Tifa ducked away from the doorway in which she had been watching, unable to take the compliment, especially considering who it came from. She cried something about making tea and dashed back to the living room.

Cloud seemed to blush for a minute, but slowly his expression resolved into contemplation. “Does the Lifestream really have the power to sort out the good souls from the bad?”

“Certainly. We’re chemical beings in the body of Spira. We know when something is bad for Spira, so when we find something bad, we make every effort to neutralize or react with it to make it more palatable.”

                “Are some souls just… bad, then?”

                “Oh, no, never. It’s hard for humans to grasp this, since you live with a short memory, but every soul I’ve seen, barring a few, will wax and wane like the moon over the time of many lives… usually, if they’re old enough, though, they steady out, to something neutral or good. The older Spira gets, the more steady, good souls it is filled with, as they all become old and calm. Tifa has a childish personality sometimes, but she is actually surprisingly steady! She feels like a hill.”

 “Okay,” said Cloud. “We should go back, I guess.”

Aeris nodded, and they walked back through the lab again, admiring out loud how very clean it wall was. Cloud wondered how much tile and plaster Tifa had simply had to replace, and how very long the effort took.

As they walked back into the living room, Tifa was sort of pacing in front of the stove, and Vincent, the beast, was staring at her with amused ease.

Tifa almost twitched when she saw that Aeris and Cloud had walked back in the room (being that Cloud was somewhat zombie-like and Aeris was not up on modern social niceties, they sometimes collectively forgot about things like ‘alerting people of your presence’) and quickly ran over to them to pull them to the dark wooden dining table. On the table, a water boiler was still letting out little curls of steam, and a white teapot was simmering away, just now dousing the newly-poured green tea leaves. “It should only take a few minutes,” Tifa said, darting away again to fish assorted teacups out of a glass-covered wooden dresser that she seemed to keep silverware and old newspapers in.

Aeris watched the tea brew with a worrying amount of delight, making Cloud wonder exactly what she saw happening that they didn’t. He hoped it wasn’t the glorious death of many sacrificed tea leaves.

Whatever her reason, her rapture kept her the only person not oppressed by the silence in the room. Cloud had no idea what to say, so he just endured it. Tifa fiddled with a tea cup for a while, then sat it down straight, with a decisive action, and asked, “Well, are you living anywhere now?”

“Uh, no. I was in the rest home, and then Aeris took me, so I’ve been sort of travelling around. I’m temporarily staying in the old mansion, though.”

“Really?”

“After seeing whose company I was in, Nibelheim really wanted to accommodate me.”

Tifa’s laugh was surprisingly bitter. “I bet they did. I hope no one groveled or anything.”

“Groveled?”

“Nibelheim’s been a perpetual funeral since we discovered what Hojo had been using our generator for. There have been no holidays or feasts… it’s too eerie, we feel like we’re living on top of graves. Some people couldn’t stand it and left. The general consensus was that we were killers along with Hojo, and it’s been black veils since.” Tifa’s arms were crossed in front of her, and her head was tilted, as if being shoved aside by a weight on her neck.

Cloud flushed. “That’s ridiculous,” he muttered at the table.  His face had been aimed directly downward for the whole conversation, as it usually was, but now he was really intent on not facing anyone. “You didn’t know.”

“But no one checked, did you know that? No one kept tabs on him. No one tried to know. We said he could do whatever he wanted and ignored the rest. Perhaps it’s worse than being the actual killer. The killer is responsible. We went through the most basic and pathetic form of human ignorance. The kind that happens when you don’t even try.”

“That’s Nibelheim… that’s small towns, you tend to your own business.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t. I think that’s clear now.”

Without any prompting, Aeris decided it was time to pour the tea. She gave herself a little white cup with a design of green vines traced on the rim, Tifa a thin cup that looked like it was made with mother-of-pearl, and Cloud an elegant black mug, for whatever reason, and filled them all exactly half-way.

“It’s not such a big deal,” Cloud said, watching Aeris intently watch the amber stream of tea from the corner of his downcast eyes. He avoided looking at Tifa. “You guys are not the bad guys here. You’d know, if you met the bad guys.”

“We did. I remember watching the priestess shake Hojo’s hand. We didn’t know then. We didn’t try to know. I just feel so disgusted sometimes,” she admitted. “This was the sort of person we weren’t going to be as kids, you know? We were going to do great things. We were going to right great wrongs. We were prepared for the trials.” She tiled her had morosely in her hands. “And then I didn’t even try. I spent my time fussing about toxins in the water when there was an actual torture prison on my doorstep. I wanted to become a great person. I was too lazy and ignorant to be a decent one.”

Cloud couldn’t find anything to say. The problem was, he had cursed Nibelheim, and ShinRa, and the idiots who turned a blind eye to Hojo’s actions many times, and though he wanted to disagree with Tifa, for her sake, out of pity… he remembered wanting to shove people’s faces into the mud with his heel until they begged enough for his forgiveness. He remembered a few fantastic revenge fantasies. They gathered in him and felt like a storm in his gut, and he wanted to be kinder to Tifa, but he also said, he felt, that she was right, and she’d better be sorry. And yet the weight of bitterness and ancient hate pressed on him unbearably, and made him feel cruel and sick. How could he not hate Nibelheim? How could he not hate her? But how could he hate her after she had faced and purified an entire hell in the name of being forgiven? How could he react to devotion with disdain?

But logic did not apply to his great and justified sense of spite, which delighted in gnawing on him. It vexed him, and torn between very real hate and very real acceptance, he found himself mostly feeling discomforted and unable to say anything. Tifa clearly wanted nothing more than forgiveness, but to Cloud, forgiveness was some complicated magical spell that he did not have the skill for. He could not do it. He could not hate her, but in the name of the whole, terrible, shit-filled world which he was mired in, he could not forgive her or anyone.

His heavy silence was enough of a confirmation for Tifa, and though Cloud didn’t want it to be so, he knew they both understood his feelings. But Tifa had expected this result, in her heart, so all she did was smilingly accept Aeris’s offer of tea and take a few sips as they waited in silence again.

“The real enemy in this is ShinRa, of course,” said Vincent suddenly. “They are the ones that knew what was happening, and not just ignored it, but funded it. I’m certain that it was only halted because of a power play, not because of a sudden surge in human decency.”

“Vincent used to work for ShinRa,” said Tifa with a hint of cheer.

“Vincent was a Turk,” he clarified for himself. “I was the worst of ShinRa’s lot.”

Tifa made an exasperated noise, and Vincent held up a claw. “Fine, not the worst. But that isn’t setting the bar high. I was a murderer, and I did what I did because I didn’t care.”

Tifa shrugged, looking doubtful.

“Is this a subtle turn into your story?” asked Aeris. “Because I must hear it.”

Vincent nodded. “I’ll keep it in brief, and mostly tell what the Ancient needs to know.”

“Sounds fine,” said Aeris, smiling. Cloud knew she was intent on the story, though she was trying not to lay on her interest too thick and giving Tifa and himself time to talk instead. She ended up looking surprisingly like an impatient six year old. “Perhaps begin with just a little personal background though?”

“If it is no matter,” he said, his voice rumbling, “I will keep as much as I can to myself.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

“ I am perhaps forty years old now, though it’s hard to say for sure, and I was born in Bevelle when ShinRa had just defeated its last competitor. I was pulled into ShinRa’s forces at an unlawfully young age, mostly because my parents and teachers found no way to channel my rage but through legal violence. I was a Turk before I was twenty.

“About six or seven years ago Tseng, who was the chief of the Turks then, as I assume he is now, told me he was charging me exclusively with a certain project. I was to be in disguise, acting as a minor science officer under the command of Professor Hojo. Tseng was aware that Hojo was delving into waters deeper than he had before, making waves that could prove dangerous to ShinRa as a whole, so Tseng thought it would be a good idea to kick Hojo down a bit. To recount the manifold reasons why we decided to put ourselves in an antagonistic role to Hojo… well, I just want to assure you they weren’t based in moral feeling, so don’t think too kindly of me.

“I already had working knowledge of basic chemistry and physics, so it wasn’t too hard for me to pose as a post-grad desperate for recognition, smart but inexperienced, perfect for Hojo to ignore and be neglectful around, since I would clearly preform any feat of loyalty for his attention. Within my first year there, I more or less understood the theme of Hojo’s plans.”

“And they were?” said Aeris.

“He intended to find a way to artificially produce Aeons, which are bound to their Aeon form through some sort of manipulation of the statue and could not escape his influence as free Fayth. Like a final Aeon whose mission has been thwarted. I always thought his plans were full of holes, but that is a reflection of his notes being full of holes. I remember seeing “statue problem, address later” on one sheet and then never found the address, though it was clearly important to him. He was never organized; his file cabinet was his mind, and his mind was a mess. I would not find copies of the proof I wanted outside of his head, and I do not have the desire to rifle around in his head. It is too strange for me, like walking through a murky swamp when you’re used to country roads. I wouldn’t do it.

“He believed that a jolt of lightning, a breath of ether, an incredible amount of pain, and a sudden death by organ failure or mental stress could cause the sort of beast he wanted, though he always showed doubt as to the effectiveness of the lighting. For good reason, I found out later. That was the most flawed of his elements. He would try to make up for the lack of spark in his designs with poisoned ether, or with such elements he felt were magical such as mako or beast’s blood, or—”

“Please,” interrupted Aeris, “poisoned ether?”

“From what I saw of his scrawled plans, and heard, he thought to cut ether with noble gases or with such things as clouds of powdered psychedelics, or even smoke of certain animals that had been burnt,” said Vincent. “He was more or less an occultist. Anything that could possibly have the sort of Power he felt he was missing, he put into potential plans. I’m sure, in the end, that his experiments were all more diseased than magical.”

Cloud noticed that Aeris looked a little paler than before. Her brow was furrowed, and she almost seemed annoyed.

“At this time, everything was theory. You must understand that when I began spying on him, he had only done minor experiments with chemicals before and had not applied his madness to any living human yet. I had to wait for him to do so, in order to bring proof against him. But he was… he was never together. It was appallingly easy to spy on him. He sometimes just told us, his underlings, things that he should have kept quiet from himself. I remember him, leaning down to me, as I tried to act intimidated, as he calmly told me about his findings as to the effect of lethal lightning magic on the skin of frogs. He spoke exactly one syllable every second, like a computer reciting a script, then he slowly broke out of his trance, and resumed his duties. He had spells stereotypically mad and unpredictable, he was clearly not aware sometimes that he was operating in the real world; perhaps he was so paranoid as to think that we all knew his plans already. I found him tying his own wrists to the desk once, giggling, I found him eating something recently killed while still at the lab table… this was, perhaps, a year after he was deemed such an important scientist that he no longer had to show up in public, he need only haunt his lab. I like to tell myself that mercury and radium addled his brain, and that he was, of course, not born this way.

“Because of this, I put together his theories very quickly, though never what he planned to DO with an army of bound Aeons. I don’t know if _he_ knew what his long-term plans were. Maybe he really just felt like making hell on earth. Maybe the means were the end to him, and he loved his life of horror and chaos. It disturbs me, but despite my best efforts, despite the fact that they should have been easy to discover, I cannot relay his motives to you. I gathered that he felt he was in the service of some higher power, but not what it was. I heard language of servitude in his speech from time to time. This, of course, I found important, since it seemed to prove he did have a goal, and that he found his goal to be noble and important, but as for what it was…” At this point, he paused, because he noticed Aeris shaking her head. “Is something the matter?”

She placed her face in her tiny palms. “A dark picture slowly forms in my mind. Please, finish it for me.”

Vincent breathed deeply, and his sigh made much of the room shake. “It will be grim,” he promised. “Of the rest of Hojo’s plans… as pertaining to this project, he was just determined to make it work. He was focused on his production of Aeons. I was there when he had his first human experiments—of course, the level on which he failed his experiments was monstrous.

“But I have to go back a bit before speaking of his actual experiments, because I must, of course, explain why I did not report them, and, consequently, why they still happen today.

“In the hierarchy of Hojo’s lab, there was one almost beside him in prestige, though he made sure she knew she was an underling anyway. Her name was Doctor Lucretia Crescent, and she had the same degrees he did, just not his ladder-climbing bloodthirstiness. She was a sane woman, and a proper scientist, who studied abnormalities in order to find ways to prevent and treat them. Vaccines and preventative care were her specialty. In the beginning, I knew that she thought the project was about testing the dangers of many harmful elements, such as battle magic, ether, and radioactives, on human skin, so that they could study how to treat these things in the future.

“She knew she was wrong within a week, since she was perceptive enough to not be fooled by what she wanted to believe, and just ambitious enough herself to believe that Hojo could be doing something truly vile for the sake of power. But, as is the failing of the scientist, she had to know what, exactly, Hojo was doing, rather than just leaving the laboratory to report that he had massively deviated from the plan. She had to know what he was doing, partly because she wanted to counter act whatever he did, and partly because she was a scientist, and she was fascinated.

“She, just like me, did not report him as soon as she should have. We were both compromised by a plague that crept on us slowly. To this day, I wonder if somehow Hojo instrumented the plague himself, through his tricks. He was mad, and his methods were ineffectual, but having known the most impossible depths of the human soul, he understood everyone else’s minds and could manipulate them as if they were simple puzzles. Well, when he was lucid enough to do so.

“My disease was this: I fell in love with Lucretia over my stay there. I admired her alone in that place, since she was their only scientist, and her company was unspeakably a relief from life in the laboratory.

“Though we both recognized there was something between us, neither of us wanted it. I was there on a mission, and at that age, I was reluctant to depend on anyone else emotionally. Since I was a Turk, that would mean the end of my job, if Tseng could prove I was compromised, and I figured a secret relationship would be a lot of fuss and distraction. What I felt for her… maybe it wasn’t really love, since we never talked about it. I don’t know. I only wanted to help her.

“That’s what it was…” said Vincent, in his low growl, almost wistfully, “a strong, unquenchable desire to aid her, to boost her up, on my shoulders, to her goals. It wasn’t that I wanted her in any desperate way. I’m not actually sure I would have liked to become very close to her. I figured myself a cruel man and assumed I would be unable to be kind enough to her once on familiar terms. I needed to watch her, from afar, and help her. I needed to be close to her, just close, not beside her but nearby, as if I were her guardian spirit, guiding her steps on a safe path. My feelings weren’t fatherly, I don’t think. They were the feelings of a devotee, who needed his object of devotion to be worshipped and admired in all the earth, and perhaps, recognizing that, I knew it would be folly to try to love her. I believed I was both too devoted and too incapable of love. All I knew was that I needed to see her succeed, and if I could be there, helping her best Hojo so that she would get her recognition as a great scientist, then I would have done enough good in this one act to last all my life. I treated her as means to redemption, sometimes… but in turn, I meant to redeem her.

“You see, without meaning too, Hojo and Lucretia developed a rivalry over the SPIRIT project. She began as his partner, but she figured out very quickly that not everything in that laboratory was as it seemed, as I said. At first, she just needed to know what Hojo was doing, so that she could bring a good case against him, then, when she started to find truly terrible plans, she needed to know in order to fix his mistakes. As she became more involved in studying more terrible things, she whispered her doubts to me, feeling rather than knowing me neutral, sighed her feelings of terror and powerlessness alike, muttered the possibility of going mad to my silent ears. I would have listened to her worries forever if she kept talking. But Lucretia was collected, and though she began, slowly, to feel like she was fighting a demon bigger than was made for man to best, she kept her struggle inside, to not alert anyone else to her suspicions. She continued to do her work alongside Hojo, pretending that they had the same innocent goals.

“If only it had stayed that way. If only she, upon seeing that first body, ran to me, to the Turks, the ShinRa, or anyone. But upon examining Hojo, in the way of the scientist, she became fascinated with him.

“Scientists are still heralded as men and women of reason, since they consider their experiments rationally. But the person who examines the ways of the world without wonder and compassion, I have discovered, is rarely rational, since the way of Spira is wonder because of wonder and beauty for beauty’s sake, and the way of humans is a system of compassion in a net of love and duty. Great passions of devotion and need drive us to our desperate deeds, not rational examination. The man who examines Spira with only an eye of rationality skews its intentions.

“Lucretia examined Hojo rationally, and rationally, she found a mind as entertaining as a mystery novel; a thrilling mess of surprises and risks. Should she have viewed him with an irrational, compassionate mind, her horror would have compelled her to work for his destruction. Instead, her scientific mind pushed her towards his deconstruction instead. He became her real experiment, an experiment of observation. I suppose she began with the justification that he was the cause of the horrific experiments, and she would medically treat the cause rather than targeting the effects. But the cause was complex, and the cause was interesting, and the cause was diseased itself, with a sort of rare disease that few men have ever caught and none have escaped. A normal case of schizophrenia is a disease for good men, but Hojo had the insanity of an evil man in a good world, and that is a fever no one sweats out. He would burn forever, I realized that.

“Lucretia was a doctor, and she believed that every problem had a solution. I have never seen faith so misplaced.

“I knew she was… morbidly taken with Hojo within a month of the project’s beginning, and that was when my feelings for her first emerged. I had been used to seeing her and hearing her soft words, and when I saw her for the first time in Hojo’s orbit, with her eyes trained on him, I felt… worry. Deep worry, and pain, and I knew that I would never extract myself from her.

“I did not, however, interfere with her desire to enjoy Hojo’s soul. Her choices were laws to me. I adored her, and though I was not far gone enough to believe she could do no wrong, I could not stop her from trying to do right, flawed as her plan was. I did not rule her, I followed her. Delving into Hojo’s soul, building a picture out of his words and his notes and his eyes, proved to be a trap for Lucretia, a trap which bound her over a process of almost a year, slowly, like vines creeping around a trellis. I watched her realize that she was in too deep. She whispered to me, below the range of the security cameras, about her fear, about her horror over her own fascination, how she was disgusted by the trap she was in, and how she knew she was in passion. She wouldn’t say love, because she was so disturbed by it. But she spoke of her passion for the Professor, and she meant it.”

“That man had to be butt ugly,” interrupted Tifa.

“Like a talking Marlboro,” said Cloud, after snapping his mask back down from taking a sip of tea. Aeris took the moment to refill his cup, chuckling to herself.

“He wasn’t attractive,” said Vincent. “If he were simply an aging, gaunt man, he wouldn’t be ugly, not at all, but he wasn’t an attractive soul, either. He could be called compelling, because he had a strong gravity about him, in the same way that black holes convince stars to come to their maw. You strain your eyes to see into him, to perceive him, and you find a great gap of darkness in space. Lucretia wanted to find his core, and undo it, and she forgot her goal of undoing his works for the sake of unraveling his self. She told me she knew what she had gotten unto. She was ashamed of throwing away the moral choice to report him for her obsession with solving him, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“That’s why she didn’t report him when she found the first body, riddled with holes where tubes had been stuck, drained of what had been human inside him and leaking something black. And that’s why I didn’t report the first body, because she turned to me, whom she knew in her unconscious as her help, and she said, ‘please destroy it.’ So I burned it, and went back to her, trusting in a plan that we both knew would never save us. She would not defeat Hojo, not alone, and I would not end the project like I had been ordered, because Lucretia wanted it, and she, with that action, was officially his accomplice.

“I don’t know how he managed to forget his dead body in the hall, though. I cannot tell you how very dismally I regarded that man.

“But Lucretia was in a passion for him, so I suffered him to live, on the condition that any parts of his body laid on her would be cut off before his nerves sent the sensation of touch to his brain. Of course, he didn’t think he had anything to be scared of. In his world, he was king of the monsters of hell, and the rest of us ogres dragged back and forth his victims for his dark experimentation mindlessly.

“Lucretia’s desperation to... to tear apart the web of Hojo, I suppose, her desperation to make him pay and her need to prove herself better than him, fueled by her hate of herself for helping him, became just as fevered as her panicked conscience as Hojo slowly forgot to pretend that he was running an innocent operation. One by one, his underlings realized they were implicit in terrible crimes, and found themselves unable to extract themselves from the pit, so they all became his slaves. Lucretia… was no less a slave, but she was the only one with a spirit still standing, ready, at the first call of victory, to crush her opponent—once the fierce desire to always be close to him cooled in her soul.

“She told me that, slowly, over the course of time, she found herself unable to imagine being without him. His whole being was now her dark side, and she could not separate them into two people. They were married, without priest or consummation. She would be beside him until death, and he inside her until hers.

“I never divined Hojo’s feelings for Lucretia, mostly because I scoff at the idea of his feelings. I do not believe he felt what we would recognize as empathy. He felt things for himself, recursive on his own soul, but he didn’t really realize feelings for other human beings, since they weren’t humans to him, just animals to be used. I assume he thought Lucretia was funny. She thought otherwise… she saw something more intent in him… but in this, I believe she was wrong.

“I did divine what Lucretia felt for me. I saw it when she looked at me, and her eyes shone with tears. She was thankful for me, and, since my purpose was to be useful for her, I considered us harmonious.

“Lucretia felt her morality slipping as her goals became entrenched in Hojo, for the sake of Hojo. She was focused on having him and destroying him, because that is what she wanted, and it burned her up inside. She grasped his experiments in her hands, and whispered words of kindness to them, begging scraps of information about what he told them from their babbling, fevered mouths, before she euthanized them. She needed, more than anything, to destroy Hojo in a way that hurt, so that she could see feeling in his eyes—she said she wanted nothing, absolutely nothing, except for a spark of hurt or jealousy or fear in Hojo’s eyes. She planned to turn him human, and pull a spirit into his demonic body, so that he could feel remorse at his destruction.

"And compassion, too. For her. If you do not understand Lucretia’s passionate, devoted hate, you will not know the feeling. She needed to be the center of his life, like a wife, but she needed to be a fire, burning his corpse, after she tied him to the stake with feelings of love and devotion. She wanted to be the rot inside him, a tender parasite.

“This is the fate of a good person who loves a wicked one. They will not destroy their need for goodness, and their goodness stops their compassion and care for the wicked person from withering, so that they must become both hurt and help.

“Finally, Lucretia grasped the whole of Hojo’s designs. I regret that I could not ask her for it, but it would have hurt me immeasurably to ask her for anything. I did not have a balanced mind either, at the time. She told me she knew his goals, and—oh, her grin! If I could describe her face to you! She knew he was wrong, and he would never understand the true way to achieve his goal. She said it was impossible for him. She thought it would be impossible for her, too, but she said she needed to try.

“I didn’t know what she needed to try. I knew it would be horrible. But when she declared that she had her final goal, the thing she needed to do to end the conflict between her and Hojo, my eyes met hers, and I promised to be hers.

“She gathered all the tools she needed,” (at this point, Cloud saw Aeris’s eyes narrow) “And told me to come with her. She knew Hojo’s schedule, and she knew he was in his office right then, and he would be in his office until exactly nine o’ clock, when he would enter his private lab. Silently, the two of us slipped in some time before he would be there, to run Lucretia’s final experiment.

“The room was grotesque. Several people floated in tubes of solidified ether; runny, slimy, greenish liquid. All looked as if they were stuck in nightmares. There was one tube… there was only a head. The head of what must have been a corpse for a long time, with a metal helmet jammed over her forehead and eyes. I remember that specifically, because the severed head, floating with a sweet smile on its lips, sickened me in a way I could feel in my bones. I think it was the mystery of what could have happened to the headless body-- the realization that I could never know what horrors Hojo had committed. My disgust for him was never higher than in that moment.

“Lucretia turned to me, wanly smiling. The room didn’t surprise her. She had been here before. I knew what was about to happen to me—she was going to make me into Hojo’s brand of monster-Aeon, to prove she could do it, and then never tell him the secret. Where she found the secret, I will not know to this day.”

“What,” said Aeris, “Did Miss Crescent say the method for making this brand of Aeon was?”

“She said she had to skip some of Hojo’s steps, since she hadn’t the supplies for it, so I’ll never know what the additions were. Besides, she thought they were unnecessary from the start. She said the process was one, ideally, of gentle transformation: an essential ingredient for a proper Fayth, she was convinced, was the willing consent of the Fayth, as well as immersion in the environment of the Fayth, which was the upper air of ether. That was necessary because humans in Spira are earth beings, and their element must be changed.”

Aeris shook her head, as if exasperated. “Did this woman have direct access to a Fayth or Aeon?”

“Not that I know of. Some claim there are scientific works written by people who have spoken to the Fayth, and Hojo said he had read them, but I never proved that. Mostly, she and Hojo were both very intelligent people, and after Hojo grasped the basis of what a Fayth is, she had the sanity to see how one could really be made. Willingness of a soul to die, immersion into ether to change the human’s element, and finally a strong, cataclysmic force, an ancient spell, that has the power to take a soul, move it past death, and ascend it instantly into immortality. It is a great spell of movement, upward movement, a spell of reincarnation, of instant ascension into a higher place with death as the gate. I understand it, but I can never fully… it’s a great spell, summarizing and bypassing the greatest mystery of life. I assumed only an Ancient could cast it, but…”

“There were,” said Aeris, “three Materia, exactly three, made to house that particular spell, named Holy, made by a particularly pure soul for the sake of the fight against Sin. She was the greatest of summoners, Yunalesca, the only one to which the creation of Final Aeons was entrusted… one Materia became part of her dead soul, so that she is Holy. One was given to a very Holy place. The last, we lost track of, since Yunalesca gave it to a follower and we trusted the line of summoners with it.”

“It was the last one that Lucretia knew about,” Vincent confirmed. “It had occurred to her early in her investigation of Hojo that she knew of a spell much, much more powerful than his paltry use of lightning spells that would probably make things work better, but she wouldn’t tell him about it. I am not sure who had it before her, or who it was that let her borrow it. It was that moment in the dark laboratory that I first saw the Materia, and I had no time to ask questions about it. But when she removed it from hidden within her bag… every corner of the room was lit, and warm… it must be the most incredible spell ever cast.”

“Oh, well, it isn’t shabby,” said Aeris smugly, while refilling Tifa’s cup. “I’ll have to brew more soon,” she noted, glaring at the teapot. “Do continue.”

“She said the spell was named Holy, and it was THIS spell that could accomplish the transformation of human into spirit, since it was a spell of pure movement, and it was unstoppable once cast. This, ether immersion, and my cooperation, said she, would surely produce an Aeon, exactly the sort of bastard, bound Aeon Hojo wanted, which she could rub in his face.

“I did not care if I would be bastard or bound. Upon my transformation, Lucretia would be free. I was already willing. I was scared, and I knew I was scared, but I would be lying if I said I did not want to do this for her.

“Besides, for myself, I had never wanted to be human… but that is a backstory you do not need.

“Lucretia held both my hands, and told me to prepare myself. I told her I was already prepared. She took one of Hojo’s tanks of ether, and hooked me to it, letting me breathe ether directly so that I would immediately start to suffocate and die. She continued to hold both my hands while doing so, with the Holy Materia clasped in the center of our four hands, warm, almost pulsing, gentle, feeling as light as a cloud, connecting us, and if we were one body, through Spira’s veins.

“And then my lungs began to collapse. The pain was entirely negated by the feeling of just holding Holy, the spell of movement, so that it only felt odd, to have a body disintegrate. And Lucretia watched me, full of pride, with tear-filled eyes, watching the darkness become illuminated, watching Hojo’s dark work cower in the face of the real spell of power and transformation. She bested him just by holding Holy, just by watching my willing, trusting death, and feeling hope and wonder in that room of despair. He was already beaten—it was a shame that he would never, ever know that.

"I wish Lucretia had known he would never be changed.

“I died, and just as my eyes shut out, and stopped seeing, she cast the spell Holy. I don’t know how she had the power to cast it. I feel like it should have taken energy beyond what a human being had. And she had suffered so much warping in her soul over the past year, I feared that she would not be able to cast something pure. But when the Materia began to glow… we looked at each other, and we both felt such hope. There are some things that come into the world just to be good, and I believe Holy is one of those things. It was already good, and its goodness prompted Lucretia to become as good as it. The energy of Holy creates the energy of Holy, and it fuels itself, so by itself it made the energy Lucretia needed for it. It took nothing out of her and needed nothing but her will.

“When my eyes shut out, I still saw the brightness of Holy, and then, I expanded. I cannot say this clearly, and I will not try. I opened up, as if I was widening outward, but when I tried to expand upwards, I was suddenly slammed back down with a weight like metal shackles on me. My eyes opened, and Lucretia was far below me, crying and grinning, and I felt heavy, miserably heavy. I tried to pull myself up from where my new body had sprawled… but I could barely move. I meant to ask, ‘Lucretia?’ but instead, I hollered, not knowing how loud my voice would be.

“Hojo rushed in quickly, delight on his face, certainty that one of his experiments succeeded, and I saw the delight fall off of his face. Lucretia turned around, slowly, her hands clasped behind her back, hiding Holy, relishing the moment. ‘Professor,’ she said, layering hate and triumph on every word, ‘I think I’ve discovered the flaw in your theory! You see, the problem is, you’re a fool, and you always will be.’

“She was giggling when Hojo came after her. I screamed, and tried to shuffle for her, but my body was stiff and unmovable. I had to watch as Hojo dug into her face, tearing like an animal. I had never seen such expression or life on his face. Or on Lucretia’s. In desperation, and panicking, I heaved myself forward. I moved my great claws, though it hurt me, reaching for laughing Lucretia, to rescue her from Hojo’s grasp.

“Finally, I reached her. I held her in my hand, and, unable to control my new body, I crushed her instantly.

“Had I been thinking rationally, I would have known I was in no position to help her. But helping Lucretia was the most important thing of all to me. I like to pretend that I did manage to do so.

“My cries sent the rest of the scientists sprinting out of the laboratory, and made Hojo stumble back a few steps, but he was so determined to not let me go that he remained in the room. Luckily, I was more determined to never see him again, and, in my muddled mind, it seemed of utmost importance to get Lucretia away from him so that I could bring her out of his influence. I think I hoped to take her away somewhere and heal her, bring her back to sanity, not really understanding that she was already dead, though… I could… well…. when… she was clearly dead.”

Tifa had moved to her adopted father’s feet, and was half-lying on his claws. He did not acknowledge her moving there, since he wanted to finish his story, but he balanced his chin, delicately, with incredible control of his strength, on top of her fragile head.

“I pulled her, and Holy with her, close to my chest, and set about working my wings to fly. I can fly, in this physical form, not like a Fayth, but like a bird, with physical limitations on my energy and speed. Like all Aeons, I do have the ability to fly to the highest airs, just not to live in them. But at the time, unused to my body and its weight, I thought my wings were crippled against flight. With that plan foiled, I slammed myself against the walls of his laboratory, with Lucretia carefully sealed from the blast, until I plowed them down.

“I broke out into the gentle sunshine of the rural town of Gongaga in the south of Macalania Forest, where the laboratory had been situated. While I am sure the locals were a bit frightened, I didn’t notice any of them. I was single-mindedly bent on getting Lucretia far away from Hojo, and after enough shambling, I found a way to fly some few miles away to a grove in the forest by a shining pool of mako pulled up from the Lifestream.

“I lay her down, and stared at her for some time until I could understand the obvious. I don’t want to go into the details of that day, but seeing as I had landed, serendipitously, by a Lifestream pool, I eventually let her sink into it, to send her directly to our Ancient Ones who live in Spira.

“After that, I slept, for a very long time. Afterwards I heard that search parties had been sent for my capture and/or death, depending on who sent them. Fortunately for me, the forest is large. I awoke in misery, sometimes I flew around Spira, trying to manage my new form, but mostly I tried to sleep. I spent much, much more time doing this than I thought, because apparently, at one point I fell asleep and stayed asleep for several years. Aeon forms run like a supercomputer on a powerful battery, they need a lot of force to exist, while Fayth forms need nothing. I had run myself out with grief, and I took years to recover, but since that was all deep sleep, I had no idea of it.

“After waking up from that deep sleep, I was no longer in the hysterics of grief and panic. Instead I had entered the apathetic doldrums of later grief. Once, while wandering, I had the misfortune of falling asleep on the edge of the Thunder Plains when they were cloudy but not raining, and realized when I awoke that a storm, filled with the powers of water and lightning, can completely ground an Aeon that cannot access their being of air. I didn’t so much mind, but if you will, I won’t get into detail about my adventures crawling miserably around Spira under a literal storm cloud of woes.

“I don’t know how much time I spend grounded on the plains, walking without really trying to escape, when I realized, slowly, that the people of the Plains who had seen me were arranging a militia to find and kill me. I admit I don’t cut a pleasant figure while moping and tearing up the ground. Eventually, a sense of self-preservation was pounded into me, and I realized that in my form as an Aeon, with little control over my powers, no Fayth form, no summoner, and no practice, these humans could very easily kill me. In desperation, I searched for a way out of the Plains, or a way to hide until I found a way to fly out. With luck, I found this laboratory.

“It was a place big enough to house me, with gigantic ceilings and rooms, and I could enter through the garage access to the side, but it was a putrid mess, and there were only a few rooms big enough for me to sit in comfortably. Then again, there was no place truly comfortable in the laboratory. It was filled with death and the stench of terror. I knew exactly whose it was, and that is when I began to piece together how long I had been away from the world—long enough for Hojo, unpunished, to continue his experiments in peace.

“My long grief was finally ended in rage. I tore down walls, decimated half-emptied labs, snapped pipes in half and destroyed whatever I could find. Hojo had surely tortured hundreds in this one place while I was sleeping and moping. My fury served as a way to exhaust my Aeon body yet again and send me into deep sleep.

“While I was sleeping, the panicked people of Nibelheim, who heard my roars, asked themselves what to do. They thought I was a threat that must be killed. But there was one who scoffed at their fear.”

Tifa smiled and shrugged. “I told them they were shit heads and that the noise was the reactor doing its fucking job pulling in strong lightning to make energy. I told them an overload had caused a metal plate to snap, which is something that had happened before, and snapping metal sounds like hell. I had been appointed the reactor’s care-taker years ago, so I told them that I would go alone, fix the reactor, and come back to laugh in their faces. And I did. I sort of lied my ass of on the way back, but I did.”

“My daughter found me sleeping, and taping into her vast resources of compassion, decided that I needed a proper bed and some place cleared out so I could sleep. She tore out most everything I destroyed in the room we are in now, and then went home to tell the people of Nibelheim that she fixed the broken metal plate on the side of the reactor, so they could all stop squawking.”

Aeris chuckled, taking a sip of her own tea. “It was quite the project to clean out a place like this, I assume?”

"That’s basically what I did the year he was asleep,” said Tifa. “I cleaned out everything dead, made this room as tidy as possible—he was sleeping on one of the half-demolished walls, but I tore out the rest. I aired everything out, added some windows, took out everything that was an offense to humanity and burned it. Sorry, I didn’t realize anyone would ever want it back.”

“Technically,” Aeris said, “I got it back, I’m sure they all returned to the Lifestream somehow, but I wanted to examine everything physically. It won’t matter that much, it would just be a confirmation of what I think I already know. But when did Mr. Valentine wake up?”

“About two years ago,” Vincent said. “I woke up, mercifully, when Tifa wasn’t here, since I was still rancorous. I was initially frightened when it became obvious that someone had been in the laboratory with me, and I stalked the rooms looking for them, but soon enough my head cleared and I realized that someone had been here, yet no harm had come to me. I realized that I had an ally rather than an enemy. I assumed that it was one of the Turks, who had finally tracked down their missing member and were waiting for me to awaken. But that wasn’t so. Tifa arrived some days later, absolutely terrified to see me awake.”

“I was taken off guard,” she protested.

“I remember, you immediately prepared to joust me…”

“I figured you were a sleeping DRAGON. I didn’t know what would happen when you woke up! I had never seen an Aeon before!”

Aeris smiled fondly. “I figure the rest of the story is more personal, and less about your state as an Aeon?”

They broke off debating to look at Aeris. “I suppose that’s so,” said Vincent. “I spent a lot of time healing, learning my limits as a bound Aeon… I have some power in elemental magic. I have Bio powers, which mostly enable me to disease and poison. I have not had much time to practice them, since I halted my experiments after confirming I had no beneficent powers. I can force myself to fly under the clouds of the Thunder Plains, but with the weight of water, it’s an incredible excursion… I have seen many Fayth fly in the storm clouds, and spoken to a few, and they say only a Fayth form will enable me to leave the plains easily, though I can crawl on the ground like a worm if I want.”

Aeris considered this. “Because the plains are under the rule of water, I too feel depleted here, but unlike you, I can directly touch my element at my feet. You’d have to journey into the clouds, and without your Fayth form, that would just exhaust you.”

“Precisely so,” said Vincent, staring at Aeris with glittering eyes. “Old One, you know why I am bound.”

“I think you also know,” sighed Aeris, hopping to her feet and towards Vincent. She prodded him absently, to all appearances feeling the texture of his scales. But Vincent could feel the movement of her tiny thread-like senses, twisting around his veins and muscles. He had seen the strange form of the Ancient, a form that he knew the humans could not see— she was an exposed nerve of the Lifestream, walking above the surface of its skin, tied down to it with invisible connections, and able to feel around her with invisible cilia which stretched from her in all directions. She was one cell of a great organism, and oddly enough, Vincent felt as if he just another. “To make spirits of the highest air was no easy task for me, and for one specific reason.”

“The element problem,” said Cloud. “The same reason why it’s so hard for you to heal me.”

“Right,” said Aeris. “Most living beings in Spira are elementally neutral. But spirits of the air and earth, like us, are polarized, and when we try to enter another element, the elements rebel against each other. We can all influence neutrally balanced humans and animals, we can all attack neutrally balanced enemies like Sin. When we can catch them. But a spirit like myself cannot effect a spirit like Vincent without expecting great ramifications and failure more often than not.”

“Yet you, yourself, made the first Fayth,” said Cloud.

“I did, that was me,” said Aeris proudly. “I knew I had to give Spira a force that was not bound to the earth, since the Ancients and their Lifestream are mostly bound to the earth, and only about a dozen Ancients were stubborn or proud enough to keep identities, so only about a dozen of us can walk Spira’s surface. We could fight corruption above Spira’s surface. Something on, or above, the surface must do that, so I figured spirits connected with the air, free to travel anywhere above Spira, would have a fair chance at beating back Sin.

“But how could I create an air spirit with my earth-bound powers? The answer was that my magic must be neutralized before it touched the people willing to become Fayth. I had to separate my connection to earth out of my power and leave only a power of raw force, raw movement, to do this job.”

“And that’s what Holy is,” said Tifa, impressed.

“Exactly. Holy is the spell of life, with no elemental connection, which can be cast by any person of any affiliation should they have the power to hold it. Holy was what I wanted to create, but I didn’t know how to go about that. At the time, Materia weren’t popular or readily available, that sort of power was left to gather in Lifestream pools, so I didn’t think one Materia could hold that power. Lady Yunalesca proved me otherwise, though she took a decade to prove it so and I don’t know if she had to transform a thousand people at once like I had to.

“My solution was this: I would start by casting my powers at a great mass of earth—a mountain. Mountains are the steadiest outcropping of Spira. They are earth, but they are undynamic, very close in form to crystalline Materia. This mountain was my Materia, my firm foundation. I poured all the power I would need for my great spell into that mountain, so that it could cook and take time to be tempered. Using the mountain, I kept the earth in the earth, and from its top purified power erupted, like metal run through a fire. That was the first Holy, a makeshift volcano from which pored the hot rock I did not need and the bright white heat that I did need.”

“You burned a mountain with fire,” summarized Vincent, “disregarded the result of ashes, but used the result of smoke.”

"I merely put my light through a prism and used the waves I needed,” Aeris agreed. “I thought it was clever at the time. And it was clever! My Fayth sprang to life. They raced for Sin. They defeated him, and in that moment, we THOUGHT we had defeated him totally. We did not know he would return, since he had never been defeated before. But in the moment of victory, when my Aeons returned to their Fayth form, they found themselves bound to the mountain where I had created them.

“I was puzzled. I didn’t know why they were unable to move from the mountain while in their Fayth form, but they could as Aeons. I discovered that the forms are fundamentally different. The Aeon works like a human, surviving off the energy that it creates itself, though the Aeon gets all its energy just from the air in an _ingeniously_ complicated process. The Fayth, however, has no form, no energy source, and no center. I realized that the Fayth forms of my children were impossible— Fayth are not made of anything and should not exist. They should disperse into air the very instant they are created, because they are just air. Yet they did exist—they had something, an imprint, which I called their shadow, which pulled them into existence.

“For the ‘smoke’ that made each Fayth, a bit of ‘ashes’ was left in the mountain. The mountain contained the shadow power for each Fayth. The part of the spell I had ground into the mountain was still connected to them, as the rock that bound their Fayth forms. They left their body on Spira, like dream-travelers, and their powerful dreaming bodies, the Aeons, were allowed to travel, but their souls, the Fayth, had to remain as a swarm of spirits flocking the holy mountain.

“I deeply regretted making a race less free than I hoped. This is why I refuse to use this grounding method, even to heal Cloud, because it binds. To try to make up for this, I separated each shadow in the mountain, and split them up into a thousand statues, so that the Fayth could at least be grounded where they wished to live. As Aeons, they travel as far as they desire, but once exhausted, they return to their Fayth form where their statue lies.

“The summoner removes a Fayth from their statue. How? They reassign the Fayth’s shadow form the statue to their own body. Any Fayth can move their shadow around, they found, but it is a risky process. If you try to put a shadow in something that isn’t very solid, the shadow can slip away and they become a lost Aeon. This is why Fayth test summoners. They need to see whether they are a strong enough person to carry their shadow in their body. When the spirit of Yunalesca uses her Holy to make a final Aeon, she connects them, mortally, to the summoner, to make a very strong bond, making it so that the summoner’s soul IS their shadow and body. That is why they are both very strong—they share their power as one being.

"Vincent is as he is,” said Aeris emphatically, “since Lucretia, not prepared for this, did not bind his shadow anywhere. Yunalesca binds shadows to living humans, and Lucretia should have used her body, but she did not know she had to. Vincent’s shadow, the part of him that would bind down his Fayth form, slipped away, so becoming anything other than an Aeon is impossible. His Fayth form has no center and cannot form. This is why he must use the Aeon’s power of regenerating through sleep rather than the Fayth’s power of… well, pretty much just being energy, To live entirely as an Aeon is a bad idea, since it is not really the Fayth’s natural form.”

“Why would a Fayth made by a human be the same as the Fayth you made?” asked Cloud. “Humans don’t have any earth powers to ground.”

“Holy copies the way I first made the spell,” said Aeris, “It is entirely possible for humans to make a better version of the Fayth. In fact, I am SURE a human could, since they could spend their whole power on turning one soul into one Fayth, bound in itself, carrying its shadow with it. I simply have not seen any human that could create a more perfect Holy.”

“A more perfect Holy.” Cloud repeated in monotone. “I see why that might be hard.”

“Don’t sass your doctor,” said Aeris wisely.

As Cloud and Aeris began to get a bit snarky with each other, Vincent cleared his throat. “You’re right, we figured the lack of my statue was the issue, though we had no clue why it was an issue.”

“Yes. The Aeons is a temporary, high-power form of the Fayth. It’s a bad form to stay in, but you have no choice, since you do not have the trigger that materializes your Fayth form.”

“Do you know a way to regain my shadow?”

“Ohhhhh my. Oh my.” Aeris dramatically plopped her head onto her hands. “How do I find the part of your soul that keeps you together? Well, where do you think it is? You died, and no one held onto your spent soul energy, so it went to the Lifestream, like it’s supposed to. And being as we’re short on supplies in the Lifestream, it’s probably already been reused as fuel to hold some nice new trees together.”

 “Oh.”

“Wartime rationing is an ugly thing, Mr. Vincent.” Aeris shook her head. “It’s possible that I could manufacture a shadow for you, I’ll have to look into it. I certainly have never done THAT before, so it would be a process of trial and error. I would oh-so-love to talk to Miss Crescent about her method, discuss the way she created you, what ether she used, whether she noticed the separation of spirit and shadow, play around with the Materia she used...”

“That I can help you with, we kept the Materia.”

“You kept the Materia!!” Aeris nearly screeched, jumping onto her feet with a little bounce. “You kept it! One of the dear little Holies, one of Yunalesca’s works… oh, you must show it to me! I have to see!!”

Vincent lumbered over to a shelf across the room, while Aeris more or less hopped in circles around him, getting under his claws in exactly the way that a cat gets underfoot. He motioned to the top drawer of a little cabinet kept under a window and Aeris pulled it open by both painted gold handles.

A light like the full moon shone out of the drawer, pouring in shafts across the room like a white veil. It was if snow had suddenly been poured everywhere, resting gentle across the room. Aeris grinned and lifted Holy out of the cabinet, gripping the chain between the tips of two fingers.

It was smaller than most Materia, about the size of a plum. It was as clear as glass, without flaw, though the surface shimmered with many colors. The glow wasn’t brilliant or glaring, but it was plentiful, and it found every corner of the room, leaving nothing unlit, brightly persuading everyone’s eyes to lift to behold it. The light seemed to just exist around Holy, not created by any effort, but turning around it like a planet around the Sun, its halo won by blessed deeds, a sort of shadow cast by goodness.

Aeris basically nuzzled it. She held it to her chest, then out in her outstretched palms, then hung it around her neck without asking. No one really considered stopping her, since shea treated it like a beloved pet. “Absolutely excellent,” she said. “As if Yunalesca formed it yesterday.”

“My only regret is taking it from its previous owner.”

Aeris hummed. “If the previous owner ever used it, I may be able to track them down. But chances are, they didn’t… from what I can tell, almost no one has used it. Which doesn’t surprise me, it works to intimidate anyone who isn’t prepared.”

“I’m intimidated,” Tifa confirmed.

“You were never a magic user,” said Cloud quietly.

“I am the fist-fighter who became one of the most important workers in Nibelheim and cleared out a freaking five-acre laboratory ground by myself, don’t test me.”

Cloud chuckled, but, like always, from behind his mask it sounded a little like coughing. Tifa looked concerned for a second, but when Cloud lowered his head in embarrassment, she deflected her look away, at Aeris and her father. Aeris was still happily turning Holy around in her hand, apparently whispering to it, and Vincent was just watching her. He seemed uncertain, but Tifa didn’t know if he was pondering the Ancient or something else.

For whatever reason, Aeris decided to plop down on the ground, cross-legged, to keep examining Holy. Tifa gazed hesitatingly back at Cloud, and he was resting his head on his hands, breathing unevenly, looking down at the table. “Are you alright?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t offer any more information, and Tifa decided not to ask just now.

“Just as I thought,” said Aeris, breaking the silence. “This has been used perhaps half a dozen times in its existence.”

Vincent settled his head onto his paws to be closer to Aeris’s level, the light of Holy making his eyes look bright pink and gold. “Really? Wasn’t it made by Lady Yunalesca?”

“Yes, but she made three, and she still has the one she’s used to. The other two she had no reason to use often, since the one was already charged and toned and fit to her. The other two she probably only tested before they were given as gifts, and few others have had the power, or the reason, to use them. So, technically, this is a weak Holy Materia, though I suppose it’s hard to believe there’s such a thing,” she muttered. “This would not make any great Final Aeons, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it would actually take a few tries to work. Luck was with Ms. Crescent.”

“Desperation aided the mutual consent between us,” Vincent sighed. “I didn’t just desire to be made Fayth, I needed it, and she needed me to do so.”

:Magic is best used as aid,” said Aeris.

“That’s what they tell us in Nibelheim too,” said Tifa, while tossing her tea cup between her hands. “I’ve always been terrible with magic, but I used Materia to help move things around in here when Vincent was asleep. I thought I could handle all this work, but it ended out that after solid months of heavy lifting your muscles actually start giving out instead of getting endlessly stronger,” she sighed.

Muscles? The Tifa that Cloud remembered was as thin as a rail. Upon seeing her again, he had let his memory fall over her actual image—when she bent around in her chair, torso and shoulders straining to face Aeris, toned forearms draped across the back of her chair and the table, he saw that she could pass for a soldier in his prime more easily than he ever could have. No wonder it was no problem for her to clean out that broken and littered lab, or to lift those heavy metal doors he could never push.

“As a practiced and also magical doctor, I hope you took many rests in your restoration period,” said Aeris.

“Of course. I couldn’t spend my whole life here, I had responsibilities at Nibelheim and the surrounding fields, since I’m one of the few town guards and monsters have been on the upswing,” said Tifa.

"Monsters are on the upswing?” asked Cloud.

“Yes, but of course I shooed them away during our travels,” said Aeris, waving her hand.

"Shooed them away?”

"Distance tranquilizing and poisoning.”

Tifa nodded, impressed. “There’s something to be said for the long-range magic caster.”

“As long as there is Lifestream beneath me, it is easy for me to send commands across Spira to some distance away,” said Aeris. “And I get my warnings about monsters approaching from Lifestream signals anyway, so I may as well just take myself out of the equation and ask my people to remove any obstacles ahead of time.”

“It’s like being back in the Turks,” said Vincent in deadpan. “Except now I am not advance guard, so that’s nice.”

Tifa and Aeris both giggled, as they were both pretty used to being advance guard. In fact, it slowly dawned on Cloud that he was in a room of elite, uncompromising soldiers, trained and practiced, each prepared to fight their battle for the rest of their lives, if need be.

A room of trained soldiers and a cripple, that is. He guessed he could call himself a former soldier.

Perhaps the most deadly, uncompromising soldier general he had ever seen sprung up from the ground with loud declarations that she would clean the teapot and take care of the tea leaves.

Once her arms were soaked to the elbows in sudsy, metallic country water, pulled from a well, she said, “I may be able to solve a few of the problems I am presented with.”

“These problems are?” asked Vincent.

“Among them, your inability to fly and your plight of being unbound, the vexing gaps in my knowledge pertaining to the construction of Cloud Strife, Sin, and other such scientific oddities, and the problematic continuation of Hojo’s existence to boot.”

“I am listening.”

“Modern mankind, humans and Al Bhed alike, have gone far in imitating the powers of the rest of the world,” she said. “They can cast the magic of the Ancients with Materia, they can roll across the waves of the sea like whales, they can build and construct living beings like Spira herself, and, like birds, they can fly, with enough metal constructing their wings. I know a man with an airship, and I will solicit his help soon.”

Vincent looked incredulous. “I thought no airships could run.”

“He was removed from ShinRa’s official project list after a few arguments, and finished his ship without their help. And while my proposition to solve your problem may be cheap, if I had the sort of time with you it would take to get you onto the airship and travelling with us, I am sure I could find the way to create you a shadow. With this time to study and help you, I would also help myself, in finding how your constitution matches my surmises about the constitution of Sin, who is my enemy, and whom I want to know much about. Besides, the destination of the airship will be, first and foremost, the office of Professor Hojo.”

“Is that so?”

"By the time I’ve met with everyone I want to on this side of the continent, it will be almost time for my appointment with the Professor that I set up a month ago! I have about a half hour meeting with him, since I promised secrets of the making of Aeons, and I know he’s desperate for any information, but I wouldn’t mind bringing a few friends to the meeting.”

Vincent smiled. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the good professor again either. Am I right in assuming you’d allow us to get reacquainted?”

“After I’ve made my acquaintance with him and exchanged whatever information about his scientific experiments I would like,” Aeris smiled. “It is foremost an intellectual meeting, but since this will be his biggest positive contribution to mankind, I feel like his work may as well end after this climax.”

Vincent’s claws skittered across the floor almost against his will. “Wouldn’t it be hard to get an Aeon into his office?”

“Not if you’re a Fayth by then, and I am certain you will be. I could make your statue a tiny, unnoticeable stone, or a Materia, even. I’m sure I could.”

Vincent stood up, paced a half circle, and then looked to his daughter. “Tifa—”

Tifa had already stood up. “I’m packing,” she said, hopping out of the room.

Aeris smiled after her. “It’s weird how far my ability to kill almost anyone gets me sometimes.”

“All in the name of science,” said Cloud, shaking his head.

“Exactly. I’m doing it for the information. Future mankind will thank me.”

"Future mankind would thank you even if you learned nothing from him, I think.”

“Are you alright with this?” she asked suddenly, turning from the dishes to sit next to him, keeping her voice low. “I know that crowds of people aren’t your favorite sorts of crowds.”

“It’s alright,” he said. “I came here for your cause, didn’t I? And they’re also here for your cause. This is my mission, as far as I’m concerned.”

“No, you see, that’s an answer to a question I did not ask,” said Aeris seriously. “I asked, are you okay with this?”

Cloud bit his lip. “I’m nervous,” he admitted lowly. “I’m nervous. I haven’t seen Tifa in a long time, I’m worried about… and I don’t want to hinder anyone. I think they should come with, I just wish… I don’t know what I want. I wish you could take them and not me. I hate how I am now, I don’t like to be seen, and to drag myself along, limping, coughing and having to rest all the time, when they’re fired up on a quest… it’s like I’m a dark cloud over the whole field.”

Aeris thoughtfully scratched the top of her head. “It’ll be a surprise for Tifa to see you as you are now,” said Aeris, “but she seems to be levelheaded enough to not make a drama out of it. And as for Vincent, you have a witness in him, not a judge. You’re of the same race—half-spirits. There used to be a lot like you, a long time ago, when the relation of humans and spirits was different… now I thought Sin was the only example of half-spirit, but I’ve seen both of you, and all the other SPIRIT survivors, and there could easily be more, now that humans are working with spirit’s magic. In Vincent, you don’t have to fear anything—especially since, you must realize, he will also be limping and dragging himself along.”

Cloud turned his face away and fell silent. As Tifa and Vincent bustled around, wondering exactly how to pack Aeon supplies for a many-month journey, Aeris waited to see if Cloud would say anything.

“And he’ll probably sleep more than you too,” she whispered. “I fully expect him to out do you in the pity category.”

Cloud rolled his head into his folded hands, his thin fingers catching the straps and tubes on his mask, tangling him up as if he were held in his own web. “I’m so powerless,” he said. “And I haven’t done any good to make up for my weakness. I haven’t used my few human powers to spread goodness, like Tifa has. I don’t deserve to be here, with you, in any way.”

Aeris laid her own head on her hands, mirroring Cloud to the opposite side. “You are here because of forces beyond your control,” she admitted. “I found you because a system of abusers located you and put you into a terrible position. That terrible position made you my target, and I swept you along with coercion and denied you time to think. I used your worship. You are tied down to the carousel of fate, made scapegoat for the consequences to other men’s actions, and I would feel powerless too. I do feel powerless too, because I am tied down to following Sin, calling for him to repent. And Mr. Valentine has not laid in an abandoned laboratory for years underneath a constant storm because he is sure he could leave. And Tifa is not here with him because she felt empowered to destroy the monster when she found him sleeping. We’re all here because we found it impossible not to walk forward, just like you did. We were shoved along our journey; it only felt like we took the steps. We were captured and tied by compassion, by grief, and by treachery. Because the pain of the world was impossible to endure, we had no choice but to do something about it. Our souls stopped being ours when they were ruptured with feelings of need and powerlessness, because we are powerless to dwell in corruption silently.

“I commiserate with you now. I have chased one man, who has been in a long stage of dying, for a thousand years, and I have never felt like I could stop chasing. I feel like a rope ties me to him, and I am tugged along, with no power to sever the thread or halt the source. So I bind you to me, I bind these two to me, I bind Cid and his Highwind and his crew to me, and many others, in hopes of mooring Sin down. And because I am pushed forward in fate, because I am Spira and ignoring Spira’s pain would mean I would dwell in it, and I am powerless to endure pain, I pull everyone into fate with me, all borne by our unsettled souls, into an impending battle.

“We are all powerless. Each of us. None of us did anything to deserve this. Jenova set a battle date thousands of years ago, and we march to her battlefield, because Spira has commanded us to go, and we are fettered in our souls to her command. There was pain, and we were made war’s doctors, unwilling, because we were cursed with the need to aid.”

Aeris saw Cloud’s eyes unfocus from his pain in the second that a sort of confusion took them over. He lifted his head to her, his brow wrinkled, his blue eyes bright. “Aeris,” he said, “I never asked you who Jenova is.”

Aeris looked down. “I’ll explain it all very soon. But now that I’ve got more than one person travelling with me, I’ll wait until they can hear about the real enemy also. I’m not looking forward to trying to repaint Sin as a victim in their eyes.”

“You’ll need a lot of paint.”

Aeris giggled.

The tension diffused to wait for a later time as Tifa came stomping back into the living room, lugging what looked like fifty pounds of supplies on her back without so much as a wince. It made Aeris’s little pack look like a purse. Her wrists and knuckles were bound in metal and she wore steel-toed boots on her feet, and she had a rifle case strapped on top of her backpack. She had taken the time to tie her long hair into a braid, so that Cloud had to stare in shock at her sudden transformation into Advance Guard of Nibelheim, protection against monsters and raiding thieves. “I’ll have to make a stop at Nibelheim to declare I’m leaving,” she said.

Aeris nodded. “I planned on taking you, Cloud, and myself back to Nibelheim for a farewell, hopefully a quick farewell, since we don’t want to waste our energy celebrating. Forgive me, Mr. Valentine, but I could not quite find justification for including you in the farewell.”

“I am so surprised,” he said, sarcastic voice muffled from where he was shuffling around the farther rooms. “Oh, where did it put it…” he muttered to himself.

Tifa rolled her eyes. “You can tell he’s getting old. He can’t remember where he put anything, but it’s important to find all of it.”

“No, no, I’m looking for the Materia that we had to show to Ms. Aeris,” he shouted from a few rooms away.

Tifa’s eyes widened. “Ohhhhh yeaaaahhh.”

Aeris cocked an eyebrow.

Tifa blushed. “Er. After I cleaned out most of the laboratory, I still kept finding things stashed away and hidden… if it didn’t stink, mold, or cause us headaches, I didn’t necessarily find it right away. But just a few weeks ago, when I was doing the last of the cleaning, Father reached up into the vents as saw someone had, for some mad reason, hidden a weird Materia of a type neither of us had seen before in the vent system, which I couldn’t get into.”

“In the vents? I don’t know what good a Materia would do in the vents,” said Aeris.

“I think it was just stashed there, maybe as people were running away from the laboratory… whatever it is, it’s definitely powerful, which is why we both found it odd that it was left behind. We surmise someone found a reason to hide it FROM Hojo.”

Vincent lumbered back into the room, a rusting chain clutched between two claws. At the end of the chain, in the shape of a sphere, there was a spot where the color was ripped out of the world. Or at least it seemed that way.

“I don’t like that at all!” decided Aeris. “Not one bit, actually, my first instinct is to destroy it for the good of Spira, but I’m valiantly holding off. Explain.”

“Just like Tifa said,” confirmed Vincent, dropping the thing on the table, where it seemed to slam down and stick rather than land, like a mass of dropped meat. “We found it after almost the whole lab was cleaned, stored in the ventilation system where no man could reach without a ladder, obviously hidden. We hadn’t noticed it before hand, and neither of us recognizes the type, or even what on all Spira could be the power inside it.”

Aeris sort of muttered to herself, glaring at the Materia. “Now this shouldn’t be happening at all,” she said, “And I couldn’t even figure out how or where it happened…” And then suddenly, she looked excited. “Oh, but if I could figure out WHERE it happened…”

 Tifa held her hands out and raised her eyebrows, in a general ‘do tell’ gesture.

Aeris pointed towards the dark Materia, decidedly less touchy than she had been with Holy. “This black Materia is a form of a Bio Materia, I suppose, since like Bio, it uses a very earthy power to a poisonous intent. However, the ‘earth’ power used is not based on the dirt of Spira, but on the rock of what we call Meteor, a small land from space that fell to Spira many years ago. I could call the Materia Meteor, since it’s full of the power of Meteor, but really, its name is Jenova.”

There was a short silence. “Ominous,” Tifa said. “What’s a Jenova? What’s this land from space, for that matter?”

“I thought space rocks were a myth,” said Vincent.

“I see why you don’t like this Jenova you keep talking about,” added Cloud.

“Wait, this fell ONTO Spira?” Tifa asked. “More of this EXISTS in Spira?”

“And Hojo has access to it?” asked Vincent, angry. “I had never seen it in his lab before.”

“I think you actually did,” said Aeris solemnly, “and you realized it then. It felt the same. You didn’t connect it, but you felt it.”

All eyes turned to Vincent. His narrowed. He looked at Aeris, disbelief showing in his face. She waited for him to say what he knew, but he was reluctant to.

“The head,” he finally whispered, “Encased in iron, inside the glass tube. The head that felt like being stared at by darkness, through the eyes of a skeleton, but I didn’t think of it at the time, because Lucretia was there, waiting.”

“The head of Jenova,” said Aeris, “enthroned and crowned in professor Hojo’s lab, accounting for his madness, his power, his control, and his arcane knowledge in one stroke. Her thoughts had turned from us for some years, and that’s why I came to the surface, in a panic. The others were unconvinced, but I knew it. Jenova has surfaced. She surfaced long ago, I believe. And this is the Materia Hojo made, his Unholy, with the power of Jenova.”

Cloud’s stomach was twisting, his nerves stinging with the sense of ‘wrong’ in Aeris’s words, warning him about the Materia on the table, telling him to back away, to keep silent, disassociate. “What is Jenova?” he asked again, his words floating, airy, uncertain, in the tension of the room.

Aeris held her breath, not wanting to speak.

 “And how in each of the seven rot-infested halls of the wicked does Hojo have its head?” asked Tifa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this seems like quite a text dump at once, it was. All of this text has been sitting aorund being edited and prodded and revised and fussed over for a while. long story short, SPIRITs is about 120,000 words in microsoft word right now, most of which hasn't been put up online yet because honestly the story is so needlessly complicated that I keep having to ret con things. I expect that will keep happening. But I'm glad to finally have at least this much up, because the little Hojo/Vincent/Lucretia hatelove story was one of my favorite parts to write. I'm sorry about generally the entire lengthy boring process that this story has gone through!!


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